Tagged With "Childhood Trauma is Tied to Health Risks"
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Personal stories from witnesses, U.S. representatives provided an emotional wallop to House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on childhood trauma
Room erupts in applause for the grandmother of witness William Kellibrew during July 11 House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. The power of personal stories from witnesses and committee members fueled the July 11 hearing on childhood trauma in the House Oversight and Reform Committee* throughout the nearly four hours of often emotional and searing testimony and member questions and statements (Click here for 3:47 hour video). The hearing was organized into a two panels—testimony from...
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Personal stories the set tone of hearing in U.S. Senate HELP Committee on Opioid Crisis Response Act
Jennifer Donahue, Delaware Office of the Child Advocate, testifies before the HELP Committee (Jennifer Perry to her right) ____________________________________________________________ Some seasoned advocates say legislators are influenced by stories while their staffs are swayed by data. There was some of both at the April 11 hearing on the draft Opioid Crisis Response Act of 2018 of the U.S. Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor & Pensions) Committee but it was the personal stories that...
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Physiological Benefits May Be Experienced By Veterans With PTSD Who Use Service Dogs (scienceblog.com)
A new study shows how veterans with PTSD may benefit physiologically from using service dogs. This study, led by the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, is the first published research to use a physiological marker to define the biobehavioral effects of service dogs on veterans with PTSD. The findings were published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology , and they may be significant as scientific evidence of potential mental health benefits experienced by veterans with PTSD...
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Pittsburgh's Resilience City Strategy (100resilientcities.org)
Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto and Chief Resilience Officer Grant Ervin celebrated an important milestone: the release of ONEPGH , Pittsburgh’s first-ever City Resilience Strategy. Pittsburgh’s story is a familiar one for post-industrial cities across the United States – and around the world. This city lost 40 percent of its population between 1970 and 2006, and faces a range of day-to-day stresses and potential shocks as it recovers from its past and experiences the known and unknown...
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Policy Statement on Meeting the Needs of Families with Young Children Experiencing and At Risk of Homelessness (Oct. 2016)
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development U.S. Department of Education Policy Statement on Meeting the Needs of Families with Young Children Experiencing and At Risk of Homelessness October 31, 2016 Excerpt from the report : Recent data indicate that among persons who seek shelter because they are homeless in the United States, the age group most likely to experience homelessness includes newborns or infants in the first year of life, and...
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Power of Networks Tapped for National Trauma Campaign
In a mid-April conference call led by the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP), participants from around the country—many of them active in ACEs, trauma and resilience networks—discussed the wave of trauma that is certain to slam communities in the wake of COVID-19. They also cheered a bit of hopeful news: the announcement of $3 billion in federal funding, the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, a portion of the CARES Act. The funds are flexible block grants for...
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President Trump signs opioid legislation with significant trauma provisions
Click here for the details of the trauma provisions included in the opioid legislation as reported in ACEs Connection. President Trump signed The SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (H.R. 6 or previously titled the Opioid Crisis Response Act) today (October 24).
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Preventable trauma in childhood costs north America and Europe US$ 1.3 trillion a year [WHO]
By World Health Organization (photo by WHO/Malin Bring) The findings of a new study on the life-course health consequences and associated annual costs of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) show that preventable trauma in childhood costs north America and the European Region US$ 1.3 trillion a year. The article, published in the Lancet and co-authored by Dinesh Sethi and Jonathon Passmore, Programme Manager, Violence and Injury Prevention, WHO/Europe, looks at the legacy of ACEs and their...
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Providers Hope Trauma Legislation Will Help Native Children in Foster Care [ChornicleOfSocialChange.org]
Recent federal legislation put forward by senators Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Al Franken (D-MN) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) proposes to address the issue of childhood trauma through the creation of a federal trauma task force. The Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families Act would gather federal officials and members of tribal agencies to create a set of best practices and training to help create a better way to identify and support children and families that have experienced trauma. In...
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Public health strategies, ACEs, and much more to learn [ClaremoreProgress.com]
What does a legislator do when not in session? Last month, I was asked by the Speaker to attend a regional meeting of key state policymakers with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It seems the committee chairmen of our health-related committees couldn’t attend, so I was afforded the opportunity to learn about something not exactly in my wheelhouse. The meeting was sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures, and is the third such specialized session they’ve...
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Rebuilding Lives while Building Homes: Tony McGuire's Resilience-Building Carpentry Class
Tony McGuire is a great carpenter. He ran his own construction business for years. Then he wanted to get into teaching. He became a Tenured Faculty member at a local community college, and landed in the state penitentiary as a Basic Skills Carpentry instructor. So how could that be connected to saving lives with a 20 buck investment? Tony got touched by CRI’s trauma-informed training. He saw himself past and present and knew somehow that, “with this information comes the responsibility to...
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Recording: Trauma-Informed Policy Making presentation at Alaska State Capitol
Last Wednesday, March 13th, I had the opportunity to present a Legislative Lunch and Learn to legislators, legislative staff, administrative staff, and the public in the Alaska State Capitol Building. To a room of ~ 30 - 40 people munching on lunch provided by the Alaska Children's Trust , and broadcast live via Gavel to Gavel (now archived here ), I had the honor to premiere the policymaker version of our History and Hope curriculum. This curriculum, and the policy-maker version, was...
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RESILIENCE: Innate vs Nurtured
For me, resiliency is in part innate. I don't think we can teach resilience. Through love and connection we can most certainly nurture it. A key piece of resiliency is connection with others. I look back at all that I have endured in my life and wonder what made me keep getting back up. Why did I become more tenacious each time life and family knocked me down? For me, what kept me going was being out in the world connecting with people throughout the day. It made me feel part of something...
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Resource Guide to Trauma-Informed Human Services [ACF.HHS.gove]
The Administration for Children and Families, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administrations, the Administration for Community Living, the Offices of the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS have worked together to develop this Guide to Trauma-Informed Human Services. The guide is intended to provide an introduction to the topic of trauma, a discussion of why understanding and addressing trauma is important for human...
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Responding to adverse childhood experiences: An evidence review of interventions to prevent and address adversity across the life course [Public Health Wales]
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are stressful events during childhood that can have a profound impact on an individual’s present and future health. Growing up in the face of such adversities is recognised as an important public health concern in Wales and internationally. Actions to prevent and mitigate ACEs and their associated harms are essential to improve population health for present and future generations.
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Rural Areas Have The Highest Suicide Rates And Fewest Mental Health Workers (huffingtonpost.com)
There is a severe shortage of mental health workers across the U.S., but the problem is most pronounced in rural areas. There isn’t a single psychiatrist in 65 percent of nonmetropolitan counties , and almost half of those counties don’t have a psychologist, according to a report from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine released this month. But even when a rural area does have some mental health workers, they alone usually can’t address the entire population’s needs. Many residents...
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SAMHSA’s ACEs/trauma-informed/resilience-building programs
The US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been the leader among federal agencies in developing trauma-informed and resilience-building policies and practices....
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Senate backs program that would prevent childhood trauma [vtdigger.org]
The state Senate has approved a bill aimed at addressing the long-term health and social effects of severe childhood trauma. The legislation, S.261 , which now goes to the House, is designed to bolster the state’s support for children and families who have experienced “toxic stress.” Exposure to severe stress has been shown to alter brain chemistry and affect behavior. A major provision of the bill is the addition of a new “director of prevention and health improvement” to the Agency of...
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Senate confirms new mental health chief [Politico]
08/03/2017 By Brianna Ehley The Senate today confirmed Elinore McCance-Katz to be the first HHS assistant secretary for mental health and substance abuse — a position created under mental health reform legislation enacted last year. A clinical psychiatrist who served as the first chief medical officer for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. McCance-Katz resigned in 2015 amid disagreements with SAMHSA leadership and has been publicly critical of their work, which...
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Senate HELP Committee approves opioid bill with major trauma-related provisions
The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee unanimously approved The Opioid Crisis Response Act of 2018 Act on April 24. Significant provisions were included from the Heitkamp-Durbin Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families Act (S. 774), including creation of a task force on trauma, and grants for trauma-informed schools.
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Senate HELP Committee schedules hearing on April 11 on draft opioid bill with key provisions addressing trauma and seeks stakeholder comments
Key provisions that are closely aligned with sections the Heitkamp-Durbin “Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families Act (S. 774)” are included in opioid legislation that is advancing in the U.S. Senate. A draft bill, “The Opioid Crisis Response Act,” is the subject of a hearing on Wednesday, April 11 in the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committee and a mark-up of the legislation is expected over the next several weeks. Senator Heitkamp’s office highlighted three...
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Separating Children from Parents Can Impair Brain Development (npscoalition.org)
The members of the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives, a group of experts in neuroscience, behavioral science and public policy, feel compelled to issue a statement in response to the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. And while this practice has now been halted, the damage has been done, with 2,300 having been separated with little effort being placed toward their reunification. A multitude of voices has risen up to condemn this inhumane...
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September 2017 Special Issue of Academic Pediatrics: Child Well-Being and Adverse Childhood Experiences in the US
The United States is on the threshold of advancing much needed improvements in child and population well-being by addressing the epidemic of adverse childhood experiences and finding ways to come together, use what we know, and heal and catalyze a new epidemic of child and family flourishing. A special issue of Academic Pediatrics highlights new national research with inspiring commentaries across a wide range of leaders, each of whom calls out the critical importance of an immediate, strong...
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Significant trauma provisions included in committee reports accompanying spending bill
The House voted overwhelmingly (361-61) to approve the FY (Fiscal Year) 2019 Labor/HHS/Education and Department of Defense Appropriations on September 26, following the Senate’s approval by a vote of 93-7 on September 18. By combining funding for often-controversial domestic programs with funding for defense, appropriators created a must-pass package and made a government shutdown less likely as the looming October 1 deadline approaches. President Trump said he will sign the bill. The...
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Spending Deal Would End Two-Decade Freeze on Gun Research [usnews.com]
By Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report, December 16, 2019 A bipartisan deal on a government spending bill would for the first time in two decades provide money for federal research on gun safety. A law adopted in the 1990's has effectively blocked such research and prohibits federal agencies from engaging in advocacy on gun-related issues. The spending bill, set for a House vote as soon as Tuesday, would provide $25 million for gun violence research, divided evenly between the...
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Sponsorship Opportunity to Help Community Resilience Initiative
CRI is seeking various levels of sponsors for our Fourth Annual Beyond Paper Tigers conference. We would love if you would consider partnering with us to assist our community's education, best practices, and treatment strategies. Sponsorships will help pay for speakers, meals, supplies, and conference activities. To partner with us at our highest gift level- as a lead sponsor- would bring profound impact to our conference. We would be grateful for the honor of calling you our lead sponsor,...
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Stanford’s Chief Wellness Officer Aims To Prevent Physician Burnout (californiahealthline.org)
Stanford Medicine hired Dr. Tait Shanafelt as chief wellness officer last year, not so much for the well-being of the patients — but of the physicians. An oncologist and hematologist by training, Shanafelt, 46, has become a national leader in the movement to end physician “burnout” — the cumulative effect of years of stress that can compromise patient care and cause doctors to leave medicine. After 12 years at the Mayo Clinic, Shanafelt now heads up Stanford’s WellMD Center , dedicated to...
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State ACEs Survey Map and Reports
A map of state ACEs Surveys provides a record of the year(s) that states have included the optional ACEs module in the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) since 2009. The BRFSS is an ongoing data collection program designed...
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State and Federal Support of Trauma-Informed Care: Sustaining the Momentum
Policymakers increasingly recognize the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences on lifelong physical, emotional, and social health and are beginning to support efforts for incorporating trauma-informed care into the health and social service sectors. This new CHCS blog post looks at how proposed state and federal legislative, regulatory, and contracting policies aim to reduce trauma and toxic stress and promote resiliency and trauma-informed practices. It also explores how federal...
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State Laws and Resolutions with specific reference to ACEs and trauma-informed policy
Click here for an annotated list of state laws that have been enacted and resolutions that have passed (resolutions do not require the governor's signature) that make specific references to adverse childhood experiences, the ACE Study, or...
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State of Balance
What activities return us to a state of balance? As a society we push and encourage each other to go above and beyond on a daily basis. I am no exception. According to Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan in their Article “Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure” a state of balance is achieved through recharging. Not the message I received from my father. What I heard from him was all about endure and a little about recharge and that is what he modeled. When he died at 51 from...
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State Policy Guide on Preventing and Healing Childhood Trauma
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. --Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa Every child needs access to the opportunities that prepare him or her to compete in the changing economies and realities of the 21st century. Unfortunately, for too many children, exposure to violence and traumatic events in the home, school, or community can affect them throughout their entire lives . We are thrilled to release this brand new...
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State Policy Solutions: Helping Children by Addressing Maternal Depression
Around 12 percent of mothers in the U.S. experience depression, and that number is even higher for minorities and those that live in poverty. Beyond affecting their own health, maternal depression can greatly impact mothers' capacity to care for their children. Members of PolicyLab’s Intergenerational Family Services portfolio wrote a brief on how states can address maternal depression through actionable, evidence-based policy solutions. We hope this can be helpful in your work as well. You...
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“Strategic Advocacy: Winning Policy Change without Crossing the Lobbying Line”: Webinar summary & links
(l to r) Kelly Hardy, Allen Mattison, Jeff Hild _____________________________________________________ The stakes in today's public policy debates are as high as they've ever been. So, how does a nonprofit organization separate legitimate and perceived barriers to find the sweet spot for maximum engagement and not cross the lobbying line? The three panelists on the “Strategic Advocacy: Winning Policy Change without Crossing the Lobbying Line ” webinar held March 14, 2019, covered the fine...
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Strategies to combat trauma addressed in second of three congressional briefings
U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) (above) delivered a strong and passionate call to address childhood adversity to reap a “huge payback” in combating addiction, family violence, and poor education -- the “challenges that confront American families.” [For a video of the briefing, click here . It begins at 17:13 minutes with the first presentation by Andrea Blanch. The sound improves at 23:11 minutes when Sen. Heitkamp's remarks begin.] The July 14th event was the second of three...
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Study: Community Trauma from Gun Violence Results in Negative Health and Behavioral Outcomes (Violence Policy Center)
Research on trauma is frequently featured in mainstream news outlets, pointing to its connection to a range of behavioral and health outcomes. While trauma can have multiple interpretations, for the purposes of this report, it is the result of experiencing or witnessing chronic and sustained violence, or specific events that can have lasting effects on individuals. Researchers have identified 13 distinct types of trauma, including community violence. Community violence is an umbrella term...
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Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It (npr.org)
Scientists and policymakers have long known that black and Hispanic Americans tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution of all kinds, than white Americans. And because pollution exposure can cause a range of health problems, this inequity could be a driver of unequal health outcomes across the U.S. A study published Monday in the journal PNAS adds a new twist to the pollution problem by looking at consumption. While we tend to think of factories or power plants as the source of...
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Suicides in Teen Girls Hit 40-Year High (nbcnews.com)
The suicide rate among teenage girls continues to rise and hit a 40-year high in 2015, according to a new analysis released Thursday. Suicide rates doubled among girls and rose by more than 30 percent among teen boys and young men between 2007 and 2015, the updated breakdown from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. It's all part of a growing national trend for more suicides, said CDC suicide expert Thomas Simon. Simon said suicide is preventable and parents, friends, teachers...
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Telemedicine connects rural Nevadans to specialty care (modbee.com)
Visiting the doctor just got faster, easier and more useful in parts of rural Nevada. That's because of the Nevada Broadband Telemedicine Initiative, announced Sept. 18 at Desert View Regional Medical Center in Nye County. The $19.6 million federally funded initiative aims to increase access to specialty care, including psychiatric services, to residents in rural areas of the state. "That's huge for patient care," said Susan Davila, CEO of Desert View, one of the participating locations.
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The Academy on Violence & Abuse (AVA)
The AVA, which raises awareness and influences changes in the way the issues of violence and abuse are addressed in health profes sional education and its academic communities, has produced a four -hour video about the...
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The ACEs movement in the time of Trump
As with any remarkable change, the 2016 presidential election, a swirl of intense acrimony that foreshadowed current events, actually produced a couple of major opportunities for the ACEs movement. It stripped away the ragged bandage covering a deep, festering wound of classicism, racism, and economic inequality. This wound burst painfully, but it’s now open to the air and sunlight, the first step toward real healing. The second opportunity is how the election and its aftermath are engaging...
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The effect chronic stress has on children at school - and why policymakers should care [washingtonpost.com]
One of the most frustrating aspects of many school reforms efforts of the past several decades is the intense focus on test scores with far less attention, if any, on the personal experiences that students bring to the classroom and how those who have suffered chronic stress are affected. The rise of social-emotional learning in recent years has been seen as a move toward embracing the idea of dealing with the whole child in school, but many SEL programs don’t use trauma-informed...
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The Gun Violence Epidemic Is Getting Worse And We Need To Talk About It (Planned Parenthood)
Gun violence claims 96 lives every day in the United States. No other developed nation experiences gun violence of this magnitude. More than five years ago, 20 children and six adults were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Since then, at least 1,846 people have been killed in mass shootings. From an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando to a church in Charleston, from a concert in Las Vegas to a high school in Parkland — gun violence is an epidemic. For every day that...
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The Hmong people prefer shamans over doctors. So one hospital decided to provide both. (upworthy.com)
When your culture doesn't believe in medicine, how can a hospital bridge that gap and provide health care when you really need it? That was the Hmong community's dilemma when they resettled in Merced, California. Originally from the rural mountains of southeast Asia, the Hmong mainly worked as farmers before getting caught in the crossfires of the Vietnam War. With the death toll rising, the Hmong were forced to flee to countries such as Thailand, France, and the United States. Mercy Medical...
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The Interplay of Community Trauma, Diet, and Physical Activity: Solutions for Public Health
By Howard Pinderhughes, PhD, University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing August 7, 2017 DISCUSSION PAPER Perspectives | Expert Voices in Health & Health Care Diet- and activity-related illnesses—such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes—can shorten life spans and adversely impact quality of life. Over the past 15 years, the public health field has made important progress in addressing these illnesses by shifting the focus from individual behavior to the...
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The Key to Healthy Cities and Hearts Might Come from the Ground (nationswell.com)
Her neighborhood is one of the four neighborhoods in south Louisville that has embarked on a $15 million, five-year study that will once and for all answer if health is tied to an area’s tree canopy. The study launched in 2018 when researchers collected baseline information about the neighborhood’s air pollution and resident’s heart health. Over the next three years, they’ll plant trees and monitor those same residents. In 2022, they’ll observe any changes. As early as 1984, researchers were...
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The Michigan ACEs Initiative: Building Resilience, Healing Communities
The Michigan ACEs initiative hosted the largest convening of ACEs professionals in the state of Michigan. Dr. Robert Anda, Co-Principal Investigator of the original ACEs study, Co-Founder ACE Interface and also featured in RESILIENCE , opened the conference and introduced keynote speaker, Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH, Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University and Director, Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative in Baltimore, MD, to an audience of...
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The myth, misconception and misdirection of motive in mass shootings
But if we want to prevent shootings, asking about motive will just get you a useless answer to the wrong question. If you use the lens of the science of adverse childhood experiences, the answer reveals itself, and usually pretty quickly.
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The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has a variety of projects which intersect with research on adverse childhood experiences and trauma. Although many projects and training opportunities are designed for sitting judicial...
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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's ACEs/trauma-informed/resilience-building projects
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Adverse Childhood Experiences page collects the latest news and perspectives about ACEs, " The Truth About ACEs " (a graphic describing ACEs), and videos. RWJF supports many projects that...