Tagged With "brain development"
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Graduations, non-linear paths, & the importance of getting started
With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big..." And then she says, “I think that’s crap.”
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Health Care Reform as a Vehicle for Promoting Children’s Mental and Behavioral Health (IOM - Discussion Paper)
Most mental health conditions emerge in childhood and adolescence (Kessler and Wang, 2008; IOM and NRC, 2009), and many develop in the context of the same risk factors as physical disease (Mistry et al., 2012; Shonkoff et al., 2009). Similarly, many...
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Hearing in House Education and Labor Early Childhood Subcommittee addresses intersection of trauma and education
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (l) and Karina Chicote, Churchill Fellow from western Australia meet after congressional hearing After watching the hearing on a monitor in the overflow room, Karina Chicote, a Churchill Fellow from western Australia, and I hustled to the hearing room in hopes of speaking to the lead witness, Nadine Burke Harris, MD, the first Surgeon General of the State of California. She was deep in conversation with others, including a young woman who wanted to tell her how...
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Helping New Parents Make Room for Uncertainty
A new program for parents and infants, thanks to generous support from Mill Town Capital , is coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. When world-renowned child development researcher Dr. Ed Tronick spoke in the spring of 2018 for an audience of a wide variety of practitioners in Berkshire County...
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Helping New Parents Make Room for Uncertainty
A new program for parents and infants, thanks to generous support from Mill Town Capital , is coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. When world-renowned child development researcher Dr. Ed Tronick spoke in the spring of 2018 for an audience of a wide variety of practitioners in Berkshire County...
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Heyman Oo integrates ACEs science as foundation of pediatric care
Dr. Heyman Oo, a 34-year-old primary care pediatrician, first learned about the science of adverse childhood experiences in medical school at a grand rounds held around 2012 at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, which she attended from 2009 to 2014. The presenter was none other than Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who went on to become California’s first Surgeon General. The founder and former director of the Center for Youth Wellness drew millions of views for her TED talk on...
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Hillary Clinton’s Comprehensive Agenda on Mental Health [The Briefing—Fact Sheets]
The first bullet under Early Diagnosis and Intervention of today’s release of Hillary Clinton’s mental health agenda is titled “ Increase public awareness and take action to address maternal depression, infant mental health, and trauma and stress in the lives of young children.” It states “We also know that infant mental health depends on children forming close and secure relationships with the adults in their lives, and that too many children are growing up in environments that cause them...
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HOPE, Engagement, and COVID19
As children grow and develop, engaging with the larger community around them provides a sense of “mattering” — a sense that their participation in the community really does matter. The emergency conditions now in effect provide numerous opportunities to children and teens to pitch in. Here are a few ideas . . .
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How chapters are addressing pediatric mental health crisis [aappublications.org]
Approximately one in five youths ages 13-18 experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. For children ages 8-15, the number is 13%. The AAP Arizona, California 3, Florida, New Jersey and Virginia chapters received Healthy People 2020 grants to develop programs to empower families, the media and/or communities to address the mental health crisis in children and youths. Following is an overview of each chapter’s...
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How collaboration helps clinic in San Mateo County, CA, tackle ACEs in children
Dr. Elizabeth Grady is a pediatrician at the South San Francisco Clinic, a community clinic of San Mateo Medical Center. She and Susana Flores , a senior public health nurse with San Mateo County Health, spoke with me about how the clinic and other health agencies in San Mateo have been able to craft ways to work together to prevent and heal toxic stress in children. Grady also talked about how she and Flores have been working with the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), a group of...
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Immigrant teens, parents explore ACEs, resilience in 5-week course with family doc
Dr. Angela Bymaster, a family doctor in San Jose, Calif., was determined to find a way to teach ACEs science to her patients. Teens would come to the Washington Neighborhood Clinic clearly depressed by a range of problems at home that were contributing to risky sexual behavior and marijuana use, as well as preventable health problems like extreme obesity.
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Interactive training on nature and health for health care providers, Oakland, Ca
October 27, 2018 8:45 AM 5:00 PM PDT Calling all health care providers! Save the date! Saturday October 27th, 2018 Join The Center for Nature and Health and Primary Care Clinic, UCSF Benioff's Children's Hospital: When: Saturday, October 27th, 2018, 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (Outdoor time included!) Where: CHORI Library, 5700 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland, Ca Register now: www.bitly.com/ucsf- nature2018 Featured speakers: Daphne Miller, MD, Physician and author Jose Gonzalez, Founder, Latino...
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Interim report of the President’s opioid commission says its final report will address early intervention strategies for children with ACEs
On August 8, President Trump spoke to the opioid crisis in this country and declined to declare a national emergency as recommended by the “President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.” Instead, the President emphasized the law and order aspects of the problem and the importance of preventing drug use in the first place since addiction is so hard to overcome. The Commission will make a final report in the fall. The recently released interim report makes eight...
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4 years after integrating ACEs science, Pueblo, CO clinic improves services for families; cuts ER costs, doctor stress
Four years ago, Dr. Leslie Dempsey would never have talked about ACEs — adverse childhood experiences — with her patients. Now ACEs is a common topic. “Just as I don’t feel awkward asking someone if they smoke or do intravenous drugs, I don’t really feel awkward talking about their childhood traumas in a way that it relates to their health. It’s just integrated into obtaining background and social history,” she says. Dr. Leslie Dempsey Dempsey is a physician in obstetrics who oversees a team...
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A Guide to Providing Telehealth During the COVID-19 Crisis
Many of us in the mental health field are being thrust into unfamiliar territory as clinicians in the midst of the COVID-19 response. We either risk personal health (and the health of our clients) by seeing people in person, or needing to utilize technologies that we may be unfamiliar with. Further, those technologies have fluid legal/ethical standards (and is even more fluid at present to accommodate the pandemic), and which require different skill sets that in-person therapy. I am...
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A Guide to Providing Telehealth During the COVID-19 Crisis
ACEs in Pediatrics community manager's note: Although this post by Daren Casagrande is geared toward mental health providers, I thought it had material that could be useful to a wider swath of health care providers. Please comment below if you have any questions or suggestions. --- Laurie Udesky Many of us in the mental health field are being thrust into unfamiliar territory as clinicians in the midst of the COVID-19 response. We either risk personal health (and the health of our clients) by...
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A Message from the President of the Illinois Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics
Dear Illinois ACE Connection members, Children and families from all demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds in Illinois experience trauma, adversity, and chronic stress. Social determinants such as where we live, work, and play, can further exacerbate positive or negative physical, emotional, and behavioral health issues. The critical factor that determines if a child, family, and/or community can manage trauma, adversity, and chronic stress successfully is resilience : the process by...
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A National Agenda to Address Adverse Childhood Experiences
What are ACEs and Why Do They Matter? In 2016 1 , nearly half of U.S. children – 34 million kids – had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) and more than 20 percent experienced two or more. The new brain sciences and science of human development explain how ACEs can have devastating, long-lasting effects on children’s health and wellbeing. These events resonate well beyond the individual child to have far-reaching consequences for families, neighborhoods, and communities. ACEs...
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ACE Fact Sheets to Give Your Doctors, Patients & Beyond (free downloads)
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.
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ACEs screening in CA — a Q and A with Dr. Dayna Long
Last year, the California Department of Health Care Services rolled out its plans for universal screening for trauma among its pediatric and adult Medicaid population. Beginning January 1, 2020, California physicians were able to receive an incentive payment of $29 for each pediatric patient screened for ACEs using the PEARLs ( Pediatrics Adverse Childhood and Resilience Study) tool. Dr. Dayna Long talked with ACEs Connection staff reporter Laurie Udesky about ACEs science, what led to the...
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Adverse Childhood Experiences Run Deep: Toxic Early Life Stress, Telomeres, and Mitochondrial DNA Copy Number, the Biological Markers of Cumulative Stress [BioEssays]
" This manuscript reviews recent evidence supporting the utility of telomeres and mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNAcn) in detecting the biological impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and outlines mechanisms that may mediate the connection between early stress and poor physical and mental health. Critical to interrupting the health sequelae of ACEs such as abuse, neglect, and neighborhood disorder, is the discovery of biomarkers of risk and resilience. The molecular markers of...
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After 5-year journey to integrate ACEs science, Santa Rosa, CA, pediatric clinic is trauma-informed, from head to toe
Dr. Meredith Kieschnick was among the first physicians in the U.S. to hear the term, "adverse childhood experiences". That was in 1998, early on in her career as a pediatrician, when the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) published its initial findings in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine . “I attended a conference at which (Dr. Vincent) Felitti spoke,” she recalls. Felitti, at that time director of the Health Appraisal Center at Kaiser Permanente...
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As California Moves to Screen Children for Childhood Trauma, Poverty Has To Be Part of the Equation
In California, we are coming full circle in recognizing the connection between poverty and health.
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BABY ACES: When we consider the traumas that qualify as ACEs, babies need their own list.
Babies are obviously very different from older children developmentally, including their ability to understand and process trauma. Indeed, a baby may be completely unaware of an actual ACE— say, the incarceration of their father— which a middle schooler would be painfully aware of. Yet at the same time, the baby could be much-more-acutely impacted by the secondary effect of this same ACE: a sad, stressed, and distracted mother. Similarly, if a parent dies in a car accident when a child is in...
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Solano County's (CA) ACEs initiative, a robust community effort, makes room for input from all
In a house called “Johanna’s House” on a tree-lined side street in Vallejo, Calif., four women are filling out the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey given to them by Maria Guevara, the founder of Vallejo Together, an organization that serves homeless residents in Vallejo. The house was named for Johanna Dilag, a homeless woman who was found dead along with her dog.
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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Strengths-based Approaches to Screening Families for Health-Related Social Needs in the Healthcare Setting [Center for the Study of Social Policy]
How do you screen families to determine whether they have enough to eat or if they feel safe in their homes or communities without alienating them? In this new brief, authors Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett and JoHannah Flacks describe strength-based approaches to screening for health related social needs.
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Survey: Healthcare providers, community organizations weigh in on California's ACEs screening program
In January, California took a historic leap forward to promote universal ACEs screening of the state’s 13 million adults and children in the Medi-Cal program. The eventual goal is to promote ACEs screening for all patients, but this is a first step in dealing with a major issue that ACEs science has identified: that many children will develop serious health problems later in life because the healthcare system is not currently set up to detect the roots of those problems. The term ACEs, which...
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Teaching kids to cope with stress
Everyone needs some stress in their lives to build mental strength and resilience, even children. However, chronic stress in kids damages both their psyche and their physiology. Here’s how one hospital’s innovative care models help...
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The Power of a Baby's Laugh
Peek-a-boo: A window on baby's brain By Anna Lacey BBC Health Check http://www.bbc.com/news/health-24553877 Baby laughter: What it reveals about your baby's brain Continue reading the main story Health Check A baby's first smile is an...
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The quest to find biomarkers for toxic stress, resilience in children — A Q-and-A with Jack Shonkoff
The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress , led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, is working on developing biological and behavioral markers for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience that they believe will be able to measure to what extent a child is experiencing toxic stress, and what effect that stress may be having on the child’s brain and development. The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress is comprised of scientists, pediatricians and community leaders, and is a project of the Center...
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The Relentless School Nurse: When the Health Office Pass Includes Emotions
The collaboration between school counselors and school nurses creates safe spaces for students at school. Building a coalition between school counselors and school nurses creates a safety net for our most complex and challenging students while benefiting the whole school community. Promoting connections through intentional relationship building, and ensuring a school environment that is physically, emotionally and psychologically safe changes the culture and climate. Read about an amazing...
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To Build a "Trauma-Informed Community" Start With Babies (www.psychologytoday.com) & Dr. Claudia Gold
Cissy's note: This article was written by the same @Claudia Gold who was the featured guest in one of our Parenting with ACEs chats . Here are excerpts from her article published in Psychology Today.
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Trauma education and mindfulness help youth living amid gun violence
Armon Hurst, 2nd from left, first row, Teens on Target, courtesy of YouthAlive! Eighteen-year-old Armon Hurst serves as vice president of the student body at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif. He has a 4.0 grade point average, is an avid baseball player, and is slated to go to college next year. But until a few years ago, Hurst would find himself waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. It was difficult to concentrate at school, and he wasn’t eating well. Armon Hurst “There...
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Trauma-informed groups rev up to address race, inclusion
Eighteen-year-old Kia Hanson has always enjoyed her time as a youth leader at the East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC). She’s worked mostly with five- and six-year-olds since she began in 2016. Recently, she tapped into new skills, especially if the kids were having a meltdown. Kia Hanson “If they’re off, we ask them, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Do you want to talk about anything?’,” she explains. “Basically asking before assuming they’re mad at the world for no reason.” What made the...
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Trauma-informed, Resilience-oriented Approaches Learning Community [thenationalcouncil.org]
By The National Council for Behavioral Health, October 2019 The National Council for Behavioral Health is pleased to announce the 2020-2021 Trauma-informed, Resilience-oriented Approaches Learning Community. Since 2011, we have worked with behavioral health, social service and community organizations to implement trauma-informed, resilience-oriented organizational change. This Learning Community will provide participating organizations, systems and communities with the tools and skills to...
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Traumatic childhood events common in WV, report says [wvgazettemail.com]
A statewide coalition of groups and people who want West Virginians to understand the connection between childhood trauma and health outcomes later, such as addiction, released a report last week that showed traumatic childhood experiences are common among West Virginians. The report found that 55.8 percent of West Virginia adults reported at least one “adverse childhood experience,” with the most common being substance abuse in the household, and the authors noted that people who report...
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Traumatic Experiences Widespread Among U.S. Youth, New Data Show
[This is a media release from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.] New national data show that at least 38 percent of children in every state have had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE, such as the death or incarceration of a parent, witnessing or being a victim of violence, or living with someone who has been suicidal or had a drug or alcohol problem. In 16 states, at least 25 percent of children have had two or more ACEs. Findings come from data in the 2016 National Survey...
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Understanding and Responding to Children who Bite
Biting is a typical behavior often seen in infants, toddlers, and 2-year olds. As children mature, gain self-control, and develop problem-solving skills, they usually outgrow this behavior. While not uncommon, biting can be an upsetting and...
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Understanding Motivation: Building the Brain Architecture That Supports Learning, Health, and Community Participation [developingchild.harvard.edu]
A healthy, engaged community depends on people achieving to the best of their potential, contributing actively to the economy and public well-being, and helping the next generation to thrive. A complex set of intertwined social and biological factors influences people’s motivation to participate actively and productively in schools, jobs, and communities–and to persevere in the face of setbacks. To unlock this puzzle and ensure that all people have the opportunity to develop motivation to...
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Upstreamist in Action: In a Texas Clinic, Lawyers Are Health Care Providers [Health Begins]
Upstreamists are changemakers pioneering practices that improve health by blending medical and social care . In this series of profiles, HealthBegins highlights some of these bold leaders and their innovations, in settings large and small. Their stories show us that the journey upstream is not only necessary — it’s possible. The People’s partnership began in 2012, when two puzzle pieces clicked together. The clinic’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Louis Appel, a pediatrician with an interest in...
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What the ACEs Screening Movement Can Learn from the Healthcare Hotspotting Movement
No brief intervention or short-term infusion of services is a silver bullet that will overcome the long-term harm caused by structural racism, poverty, and multi-generational trauma.
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When Parents Fear "It's All My Fault"
Many of my colleagues in the field of early childhood mental health work with what are termed "high risk" populations. Children of drug addicted parents, victims of child abuse, and families in abject poverty. While the challenges these families face are daunting, I find myself feeling some envy for my colleagues whose clients are in such obvious distress that the need for intensive treatment of parent and infant is not in question. In my rural, small-town population things are not so clear.
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Why I believe Gregory Williams, and his book, Shattered By The Darkness, will help save lives and revolutionize healthcare.
When you first hear about it, it sounds unlikely, fact that something that happened to someone in utero, at the age of two months, or four years, or any time in childhood, is what is killing them as an adult, or making them want to die, or making them want to hurt themselves or others. Yet the connection between childhood trauma and adult disease, mental illness, addiction, suicide, violence – most all of society’s ills – is as irrefutable as the myriad truths revealed about it in the...
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Why screen if there are no services? (Barbara J. Howard - Pediatric News)
Why screen if there are no services? By: DR. BARBARA J. HOWARD OCTOBER 6, 2014 Behavioral Consult Do you remember the discussion of the ethical dilemma of Huntington’s disease you probably participated in during medical school? The...
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Why We Suck (at Self-Soothing & Self-Care): Dr. Dawn O'Malley
Without yoga and coffee, I'm kind of a jerk. These are my personal "puppy uppers and doggie downers" and prevent me from being cranky, quick to cry, and ready for conflict. Coffee and calming make life more manageable. Humans even seem tolerable. Without them I might veer into hating humans for being so needy which is not a great trait for a parent, partner or a professional. Or a self. My partner says coffee and exercise are acts of kindness, service as promote public safety. In other...
Calendar Event
2020 Pediatric Brain Health Summit
Comment
Re: Screening for childhood adversity: the what and when of identifying individuals at risk for lifespan health disparities [Journal of Behavioral Medicine]
never mind. found it at the library! thanks for sharing! great forum! As a Principal Investigator on an NIHCD funded grant to develop a screening instrument for children at risk this is especially timely! working on first paper for our tool now- happy to share more if folks are interested. anyone working internationally on screening kids? I'd love to chat. contact me at cj@artemisassoc.com Carmela
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Re: Dr. Claudia Gold: Empathy & Listening as ACE-Informed Practice
What a refreshing hope-filled read! I love this message - how it supports the development of the parent's self-efficacy and encourages them to develop confidence in their natural intuition. As a public health nurse, I've met many parents who were motivated to parent well- but who did not have role models that they could lean on or learn from. It is these parents who would benefit so much from this holistic approach. Thank you for sharing!