September 2016

Trish Buchanan's husband, Paul Buchanan, was a decorated East Hartford police officer who took his life in March 2013 after months of struggling with depression. He had feared the repercussions that seeking help for mental illness might have on his career, Trish Buchanan said. When they finally called some mental health professionals, they were asked whether Paul was at immediate risk, otherwise the soonest he would be able to see someone would be six weeks later. When they did find someone...

I was 16 when I had my first full panic attack. I sat clutching my French horn (yes, I played the French horn), waiting for a solo in a school band performance, and found I couldn't catch my breath. My stomach and chest felt impossibly tight. This wasn't an average case of nerves: my entire body responded to the fear of playing music publicly with what I now understand to be chronic anxiety. I felt I might die. I managed that day to slow my breathing just enough so I could finish my solo...

Imagine you're working at a school and one of the kids is starting to act up. What do you do? Traditionally, the answer would be to give the unruly kid detention or suspension. But in my memory, detention tended to involve staring at walls, bored out of my mind, trying to either surreptitiously talk to the kids around me without getting caught or trying to read a book. If it was designed to make me think about my actions, it didn't really work. It just made everything feel stupid and unfair.

Prevent Child Abuse America partnered with KPJR Productions, producers of the ACE themed films Paper Tigers and Resilience to host a Congressional Briefing on September 21. Read more about the standing-room-only event here: http://preventchildabuse.org/latest-activity/resilience-congressional-briefing/

I’ve always been intrigued by the different choices people make, while working to restore good boundaries in their life after an experience of abuse. Whether it’s re-establishing the broken boundary with the abusive person, or finding a safe way to relate to others, the memory of betrayed trust can complicate decisions about how to maintain safety. When I think about my own relationship to personal boundaries, I’m often reminded of the iconic phrase, “good fences make good neighbors.” I...

The number of children in the world today that have suffered a traumatic incident is on the rise. People do not realize how close these issues truly are to the communities across America. It is for this reason that the Crawford and Erie County Human Services along with Edinboro University and Peace4Crawford began working together to educate members of the community. Monday, Sept. 26, will mark the Third Annual Trauma Informed & Resilient Communities Conference. This year’s conference...

Standing at the end of Checkout No. 4, Jesse Bent made quick work of the groceries coming his way. He stood the Stouffer’s lasagna in a plastic bag. He gently laid loaves of Rotella’s bread. He double- wrapped the meat. “Didya have a good weekend?” Jesse bantered easily with a customer in a red Nebraska ballcap. The man did, naturally. The Huskers had won. Husker Hat and Jesse shared a chuckle about that, and in a minute, Husker Hat was out the door with a cart, and Jesse got to clock out.

I f your doctor diagnoses you with chronic fatigue syndrome , you’ll probably get two pieces of advice: Go to a psychotherapist and get some exercise. Your doctor might tell you that either of those treatments will give you a 60 percent chance of getting better and a 20 percent chance of recovering outright. After all, that’s what researchers concluded in a 2011 study published in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, along with later analyses. Problem is, the study was bad science.

This is the executive summary for a longer report, which gives an estimate of the number of immigrant and refugee children who will enter the United States in 2016, where they come from, and the traumas they face. It includes recommendations for policy and practice. [Read it here http://www.childtrends.org/?publications=moving-beyond-trauma-child-migrants-and-refugees-in-the-united-states-executive-summary]

When I read about the crisis in Texas foster care system, all I can think about is my beautiful younger sister Nannette. Nannette got out of foster care, but she didn't survive. She became a statistic, a victim of the consequences of what experts call adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Research has shown that ACEs accumulate over time, and the number of these experiences in childhood predicts morbidity and mortality in adulthood. It doesn't say it on her death certificate, but Nannette...

According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, nearly 35 million children in the United States are living with emotional and psychological trauma. For these children, the effects of abuse, neglect, poverty, violence, imprisonment, homelessness, and loss come at a serious cost to their health and educational attainment. Their traumatic experiences impair their ability to learn, alter their brain chemistry and development, prompt feelings of isolation and helplessness, and may even...

Sarah Stillman, a long-form journalist for The New Yorker who often focuses on social injustice, is one of the 23 winners of the 2016 MacArthur Foundation fellowships announced today. She has written about the juvenile justice system’s treatment of children as adult offenders who were placed on sexual offender registries due to sexual misconduct as juveniles and about youngsters enlisted as confidential informants for police, a high-risk job. [For more go to ...