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The day Tarra Simmons walked out of Mission Creek Correctional Center for Women in 2013, she owed $7,500 to Kitsap County in Washington state. These court-mandated fines and fees, known as legal financial obligations, or LFOs, included charges for “services” she had “rendered” — police, court, public defender , DNA collection — and some line items unrelated to her case, such as expert witnesses and victims’ services. (Her case had no named victim.) Simmons had spent the previous 20 months of...

COACH is a method for developing authentic healing relationships with patients, encompassing the Camden Coalition’s tools, philosophies, and techniques for supporting patients with complex health and social needs in managing their health. Recently, we published our COACH framework as a manual with the help of our friends at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia . COACH is proving useful for not just health care providers: In Camden, the city’s school district is learning...

Jo Poshard of the Poshard Foundation says more and more social service agencies are interacting and sharing information. She believes they are trying hard to take a team approach to serve the best interest of the child. “Trauma-focused training that we did and that we completed was a wonderful example of agencies coming together and working together,” Poshard said. Ginger Meyer, clinical director for the Children’s Medical and Mental Health Resource Network, said the training grew out of a...

ABOUT THE PROJECT Today, we can accurately predict a Coloradan’s health outcomes and access to health care based on factors like their race, income, or ZIP code. This is unacceptable, because it means that people of color, Coloradans with less economic opportunity, those living in communities with fewer resources, and others, face increased barriers to good health simply due to their life circumstances. How did this happen? Colorado—just like the rest of the US—has a long, well-documented...

The current adverse childhood experience (ACE) survey does not include exposure to community violence (ECV) as a category. A new study by Lee, Larkin, and Esaki (2017) point to evidence that ECV fits the World Health Organization (WHO)’s classification for an ACE category, that it must: cause biological stress response, be sensitive to policies, be common across societies, be able to be measured quickly and easily, and be proximal in respect to causality (WHO, 2011). Lee et al. (2017)...

My depression emerged when I was only six years old. It started after my dad abandoned my mom, my sister, and me. He was abusive to my mom, but I was still devastated when he left because we’d been very close. He left us with months of unpaid rent. We didn’t have any food. Sometimes we would eat ice for dinner. I endured so much turmoil and suffering as a child. It was a level of trauma that made it hard for me to get through every single day. Meanwhile, I was being bullied in school. I...

One day several years ago, I spontaneously hugged a patient of mine, Gretchen. It was during a moment in which her despair and distress were so intense that it seemed cruel on a human level not to reach out my arms to her, in the event that she might derive some relief or comfort from an embrace. She hugged me for dear life.

Looking for a way to help manage anxiety ? Grab a pen. Logging your stressors in a journal might help mitigate those emotions, according to new research presented at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America’s 2017 conference. Researchers found that those who wrote down each event that caused concern, as well as an analysis of how the concern made them feel, experienced less worry over time . The results indicate that keeping a journal could be an effective tool as part of an overall...

When you go to a doctor’s office, do they ask you how you feel emotionally? Research suggests that they should, because physical health and mental health are connected. In a ten-year study, Intermountain Healthcare found important correlations in helping people heal better by using team-based practices with patients, including having mental health experts in the doctor’s office. The study was published in Journal of the American Medical Association and recently won the national Hearst Health...

Here is an excerpt from a GREAT article by Jay Watts : Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty , relative inequality , being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse , early separation , emotional...

Elisabeth Corey writes so honestly on her Beating Trauma blog . I'm a huge fan of her writing and advocacy work. This piece, in particular, is amazing. She writes about adult relationships and how they have been impacted deeply and consistently by ACEs in childhood. We know what we have lived. Unlearning and learning new and different things takes time and work. And it helps, that parents like Elisabeth share as they learn. We all benefit from that sharing. Many of us are learning how to...

Pam Bunyon faced the 4th graders, some splayed in chairs but most arrayed on the rug before her. On the whiteboard, she showed them the outline of a human head. Next to it were some big words for the 9- and 10-year-olds: Cortex. Amygdala. Brain stem. Bunyon, the counselor at Powel Elementary School, was using science to help students understand their impulses and give them strategies to deal with them. “So we don’t flip out,” as she and the class put it. [For more of this story, written by...