August 2018

Amy Moseley, community coalitions manager for Children’s Trust of South Carolina, had worked with mothers and babies in maternal-infant health care and with children in foster homes, with victims of sexual assault and individuals with disabilities. She’d noted how poverty and other adversity unspools over the lifespan, how health disparities can persist through generations. Learning about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) “was seeing the thread between all the areas I had worked in. It...

Alexandria, VA - In recognition of the challenges a new school year presents for children and adolescents, Mental Health America (MHA) is providing new resources on student mental health ( http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/back-school ), with an emphasis on web-based tools that can be easily shared across social media platforms. This year, MHA has developed tools and resources to help increase understanding of how traumatic events can trigger mental health issues and is providing materials...

Ryan Crotwell's memories of growing up in French Settlement are filled with mental snapshots of abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father. First he remembers kneeling on rice. Then the whippings started — "switches, belts, whatever was within reach." Crotwell, 34, recalls acting out in school and receiving brutal punishments at home. He was institutionalized for psychiatric treatment twice before his 10th birthday and diagnosed with various psychological conditions including attention...

With school starting up this month, there is a lot of excitement (if not always enthusiasm) brewing in my house and throughout all of our neighborhoods as kids get prepared. New clothes, school supplies, sports practices, registration and finally the first day of school. All of the annual rituals. That’s what it should be about. All the fun stuff before they get back to work. Increasingly, though, our schools find themselves thinking about safety. Parents worry. Parkland, Florida, may be a...

Like most of us, @Rosemary Conder tries to avoid the repetitive ads that scroll down the side of her Facebook page. One day, however, an ad for a particular book caught her eye. It was a book that would serve as the basis of an ongoing quest to find a solution to child abuse, a topic that has become her passion and life’s work. Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment is a book co-authored by Dr. Catherine Ortega Courtney and...

To have a productive conversation about health equity, we need to get one thing straight: equity is not the same as equality. Striving for equality alone can actually perpetuate disadvantage. To remedy health disparities, some communities need more—not just equal—resources. Watch this brief illustration from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to get clear on equity vs. equality. Truly attaining the “highest health of all people” starts with embedding fair opportunities for well-being into...

Amid the sound of television and hair clippers buzzing around him at Goodfellas Barbershop in Little Rock, Arkansas, Lorenzo Lewis was trying to get a man wearing a mask to talk about his emotional pain. Lewis asked the man how he was doing. “I’m good, I’m good,” he responded. Lewis said how he’d noticed he seemed on edge recently. Same response. Lewis kept asking questions until the man eventually took off his mask. “I’m hurting,” he said. “I’m just really going through something right...

Emotional neglect, physical abuse, divorce, a household riven by addiction — science shows that traumas like these in childhood cause poorer health later in life, both mentally and physically. The first research was conducted in the late 1990s and recently popularized by San Francisco pediatrician and author Nadine Burke Harris . Doctors behind the first study dubbed these childhood traumas “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs, and devised a measurement scale: For each negative...

Prison inmates across the country are amid a two-week strike to protest what they say are exploitative labor practices and unfair treatment by the criminal justice system. In California, more than 2,000 inmates are currently fighting the state’s wildfires, earning a dollar an hour. Forum examines the history, ethics and legality of inmate labor. Guests: Sharon Dolovich, law professor, UCLA School of Law Alex Lichtenstein, professor of labor history, Indiana University [To listen to this...

A study published early this year assesses the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences in America by state, race or ethnicity, and income level. Read the full article here .

Because we are living in an epidemic of childhood trauma, we view each city with the eye of epidemiologist who is seeking to understand just how many children are living in homes with trauma-inducing levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). ACEs include many forms of abuse and neglect and act like a virus, often being passed from one generation to another. As we traveled to do a talk on preventing ACEs and trauma in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we knew that it has a population of...

During this podcast, I sat down with ACES Connection member, Stacy Brookman, host of the Real Life Resilience Podcast, to discuss her role as a resilience and life storytelling expert, finding clarity, her upcoming Emotional Abuse Recovery and Resilience Summit, and more.