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I was first inspired to create a fact sheet summarizing the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) after reading a comment in “Got Your ACE score?” A reader wished she had a form to give her doctor that documented the vast body of evidence explaining how early trauma increases risk for chronic physical and mental health conditions and much more. I could relate.

"Don't ask 'what's wrong with you.' Ask, 'what happened to you.'" I watched the Oprah segment with my mother, Dr. Louise Hart, who heard Dr. Vincent Felitti speak about the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study ten years ago. At that time, she asked him, "What is being done with this incredible information?" And he replied, "not much." It inspired her to come out of retirement and write another parenting book, which turned into The Bullying Antidote . Published in 2013,...

I have to say I am quite impressed with the people who have reached out to me after I posted that I was interested in collaborating. Over my 30 years working in healthcare -- with a focus of quality improvement -- I have recognized over and over that we are such a reactive society. BUT!!! You guys rock. So many people are doing AMAZING things. But we are mostly invisible, as the reactive seems to outshine the proactive prevention. BUT!!!! Not if we can collaborate and band together. Just...

Eight years ago, as Safiya Umoja Noble was entertaining her nieces, she had a horrible revelation. Noble, now a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications, googled the phrase “Black girls” looking for useful ideas. She instead found a page full of pornography. Disturbed that the world’s most popular search engine could create such a distorted view of Black women and girls, Noble spent the next several years tracing the consequences of algorithmic...

When we think of student protests, it is most often of protests on college campuses — from the waves of unrest during the Vietnam War to the more recent campus clashes involving Black Lives Matter advocates and white nationalists . But since the Civil Rights era, some of the most impactful youth protests have taken place in high schools and even junior high schools. Acts of civil disobedience by students barely into their teens have marked seminal points in historic battles over bedrock...

Recently, one of my friends was venting about her teenage daughter being “so ungrateful!” She asked me, “How can she not know how much she has?” This mom isn’t alone. Parents hope (or expect!) that their children will grow up to be grateful. In a recent study , Amy Halberstadt and colleagues found that parents get peeved when their children don’t show gratitude . As one parent said, “I can be embarrassed as a parent, I can feel angry at [my child] that he hasn’t sufficiently conveyed...

As the opioid epidemic rages across the country, data tracking its evolution often lags far behind. A few months ago, I set out to compile data on opioid prescribing, overdoses and deaths, as well as treatment options. It was more difficult than I expected: Much of the data was out of date, some was hard to find and some data contradicted other data, making conclusions difficult. I put the datasets I could find into a tipsheet , which I shared last week at the National Institute for...

Finding affordable housing isn’t getting any easier for the more than a quarter of U.S. renters that are extremely low-income. For six years, the National Low Income Housing Coalition has released an annual report calculating the discrepancy between available affordable housing units and renters who earn below the poverty line or 30 percent of the area median. Last year, they found that for every 100 households categorized as extremely low income (ELI), only 35 affordable rental homes are...

A new paper confirms what many Americans likely suspected: A mass economic downturn—on the scale that occurred during the Great Recession—makes people physically sick. Past research has been surprisingly mixed on the effect of economic downturns on physical health. A review paper published in 2016 found that though alcohol use and traffic fatalities declined during the Great Recession, overall, people had fewer babies, had worse mental health, and were more likely to kill themselves. But...

A woman receives a breast cancer diagnosis and opts for a mastectomy — only for her doctor to object: “But you aren’t married.” A young girl suffering from endometriosis, a condition in which uterine cells migrate to other areas of the body, is informed by her doctor that childbirth will ease the pain. “I’m only 11,” she later tells her support group, baffled. A woman complains of vomiting uncontrollably, up to 100 times a night. She is offered antidepressants. When it finally occurs to a...

For the past year, Lois Beckett [ @loisbeckett ], senior reporter at The Guardian US , has been showing up at white nationalist rallies, taking their pictures, writing down what they say. And she finds herself thinking: How did we get here? How did her beat as a political reporter come to include interviewing Nazis? And what are the consequences of giving these groups this much coverage? In this week's program — the culmination of a months-long collaboration between On the Media and The...

Training to help children who face early childhood trauma is to be offered to all schools in Wales. Teachers will be taught how to support pupils who have adverse experiences such as family breakdown, bereavement or physical, sexual or substance abuse. It follows a pilot project at three primary schools in Bridgend county. [For more on this story, go to http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-43345927 ]