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Dear ACEs Connection Community - Until recently, I was the Chief Learning Officer at a national non-profit organization called Community Solutions . Last summer, I co-facilitated a group of community stakeholders, all of whom were committed to the act of creating a 'community response model that would mitigate the effect of childhood exposure to domestic violence'. The work was place-based, focused on Brownsville, Brooklyn. During the course of our facilitation, the group determined a need...

“Several psychiatric disorders have been associated with an increased risk of violent crime (eg, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder). However, not all phenotypes within and between psychiatric disorders may be associated with an increased risk of violence,” Hanna Sahlin , MSc, of Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, and colleagues wrote. “Because self-harm occurs in the context of many different psychiatric disorders, it could be used as a...

Abstract “Trauma-informed practice” is an increasingly prevalent approach in the delivery of therapeutic services, social and human services, and now legal practice. Put simply, the hallmarks of trauma-informed practice are when the practitioner puts the realities of the client’s trauma experiences at the forefront in engaging with the client, and adjusts the practice approach informed by the individual client’s trauma experience. Trauma-informed practice also encompasses the practitioner...

This summer marks nearly three years not only since the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, but also since a major transformation began in the American criminal justice system. Police departments are increasingly implementing training regimens to combat racial bias and requiring officers to wear body cameras, with some 95 committing to do so in the future in January of 2016; district attorneys are increasingly prosecuting police officers...

Creating a supportive environment is helping reduce student behavior issues in Arizona schools and empowering students to pause before they respond instead of reacting to adverse events. Just before spring break, a second-grader was crying while waiting outside the office at Holiday Park Elementary School and the boy beside him urged him to take a few deep breaths, said Rebecca Leimkuehler, principal of the school in Cartwright Elementary School District in Phoenix. “After several minutes, I...

After playing a special video game for four weeks, a group of children with sensory processing dysfunction who also suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder showed such noticeable improvements in attention span that a third of them no longer fit the criteria for ADHD, according to a new study. In the UC San Francisco report , which appeared Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, researchers measured the impact of cognitive training on attention spans among 38 children...

Take a deep breath in through your nose, and slowly let it out through your mouth. Do you feel calmer? Controlled breathing like this can combat anxiety, panic attacks and depression. It's one reason so many people experience tranquility after meditation or a pranayama yoga class. How exactly the brain associates slow breathing with calmness and quick breathing with nervousness, though, has been a mystery. Now, researchers say they've found the link, at least in mice. The key is a smattering...

“I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary,” wrote Billy Baker in his recent exploration of male loneliness in The Boston Globe . Perhaps one reason the piece made so many internet rounds is just how many people could relate: Last year Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that Americans are “facing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.” [For more of this story, written...

When my daughter was younger I was anxious. I didn't have full-blown anxiety attacks, as some do. I had an almost constant anxiety motoring within me. It was mixed with dread. Sometimes, it lasted days. Other times weeks. It would come and go. It always returned. When it did, it was hard to read, concentrate or focus. It was hard to eat or sleep or work. It was hard to parent. How I felt in my body scared me and I wanted to be someone else. Anxious time moved slowly. An hour felt like a...

While perceived discrimination on college campuses compromises the self-esteem, well-being and mental health of ethnic minority students, new psychology research from The University of Texas at Austin suggests the impostor phenomenon may worsen these effects. The impostor phenomenon — or feeling like a fraud due to an inability to internalize success — has been linked to psychological distress among ethnic minority students, research shows. In the Journal of Counseling Psychology , UT Austin...

Lawmakers in New York, North Carolina, Missouri and Texas are currently debating proposals that would move 16- or 17-year-olds (or both) out of the adult criminal justice system and into the juvenile court. This development comes after seven states raised their age of jurisdiction over the past decade. In those states, as a result, half the number of youth who were previously automatically sent to adult courts now appear before a juvenile court judge — an outcome that increases the...

I have attended 12-step groups off and on for years including Adult Children of Alcoholics, Codependents Anonymous, Adults Molested as Children, Al-Anon, Overeaters Anonymous. Has anyone had success in introducing ACE questions into their sharing? Because it is not "sanctioned 12-step literature"....I took a "verbal beating" for doing such at last week's meeting. I handed out the questionnaire and resilience questionnaire too....before the meeting had started, but the questions started to...