June 2021

I am so excited and honored to have a meaningful conversation about trauma and addiction with Amanda Wendler, Libby Alexander, Eli Saslow, Gabor Maté and surprise guests! As a recovering addict of 36 years I have been through a lot, seen a lot and learned a lot. And so, the conversation keeps evolving and that’s how it should be. The minute I think I know it all is the minute I am in trouble. So I remain teachable while continuing to share my personal experience, strength and hope. I believe...

By Carol Anderson, The Guardian, June 4, 2021 B odies are piling up all over the second amendment as two of America’s pandemics converge. The “ plague of gun violence ” and the inability to mount an effective response , even in the wake of multiple mass shootings , is, unfortunately, rooted in the other pandemic gripping the United States: anti-Blackness and the sense that African Americans are a dangerous threat that can only be neutralized or stopped by a well-armed white citizenry. For...

From BioSpace, June 4, 2021 Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has been awarded a $2 million grant from the state of California to study a precision medicine approach to screening children for adverse childhood experiences. The three-year grant—part of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine —was announced by the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, in partnership with the Office of the California Surgeon General. Adverse childhood experiences, also called ACEs, are...

By Jason DeParle, The New York Times, June 2, 2021 Julesa Webb resumed an old habit: serving her children three meals a day. Corrine Young paid the water bill and stopped bathing at her neighbor’s apartment. Chenetta Ray cried, thanked Jesus and rushed to spend the money on a medical test to treat her cancer. In offering most Americans two more rounds of stimulus checks in the past six months, totaling $2,000 a person, the federal government effectively conducted a huge experiment in safety...

By David Orenstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 3, 2021 A powerful series of speakers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory’s biennial Spring Symposium, Early Life Stress and Mental Health, blended personal stories and rigorous research to demonstrate that while remedying the lifelong toxic stress and disadvantage many people incur during childhood can be difficult, it is by no means intractable. Picower Institute Director Li-Huei Tsai opened the symposium,...

"We have simply got to make people aware that none of us are free until we’re all free, and we aren’t free yet." -Opal Lee Learn about Opal Lee, her story of resilience, and her work to make Juneteenth a national holiday here . Last October, Governor Northam signed legislation declaring Juneteenth a holiday in the state of Virginia. Learn more about the origins of the holiday here . Read and download the issue brief Adopting a Trauma-Informed Approach for LGBTQ Youth Part 1 and Part 2 . The...

We're so excited to welcome you all to the first day of The Wisdom of Trauma world movie premiere and 7-day Talks on Trauma! We've been working on the film for over 4 years and tending to the creation of the event for so many months now, and we can't wait to share all the wisdom and resources our guests are bringing. Each day of the event we'll send out an e-mail with the day's schedule. Please find tomorrow's schedule below. We also encourage you to attend our LIVE opening talk with Dr.

The only thing I knew about Oprah Winfrey until recently was that she was a successful media personality and for a long time struggled with her weight. What I didn’t know about Oprah was the extent to which she suffered childhood trauma and how that trauma manifested itself throughout her life.

By Jennifer Mascia, The Trace, June 1, 2021 Shortly after the May 26 shooting at a San Jose, California, light rail yard, which left nine people dead, national media outlets seized on a pair of sobering statistics: The rampage was the 232nd mass shooting in 2021, and the 17th mass shooting in the U.S. in less than a week. The source of those figures is the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), an increasingly sought-after resource for gun violence statistics. GVA defines mass shootings as...

By Emily Meriam, Ross Donihue, and Craig McCabe, ArcUser, June 2021 Redlining is the practice of discriminating against residents of an area based on race or ethnicity through systematic policies that deny financial services—especially mortgages—that are applied based on location. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 to increase homeownership as part of the New Deal. HOLC mapped neighborhoods and assigned grades to areas based on perceived lending risk factors that...

By Karen D'Souza, EdSource, June 2, 2021 The California Legislature took steps Tuesday to respond to the calls of the state’s child care sector to increase what the state pays to support the system. They emerged with a new early learning and care package that doubles the number of subsidized child care slots proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and changes in how child care centers are paid in an effort to rescue the fragile system. While Newsom expanded transitional kindergarten and created...

By Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, June 4, 2021 At a time when many school officials thought the best way to deal with problematic students was to suspend or expel them, Susan F. Cole realized what may seem obvious now: Sometimes, trouble at school meant trauma at home. Beginning in the 1990s, she became a leading voice in the movement to create “trauma-sensitive schools” in her own state, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, ones where the staff understands that abuse, neglect, hunger and...