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...

By Sarah D. Sparks September 17, 2019 Math teacher Veronica Lyon is one of the people who makes support for traumatized students work at Lincoln Middle School in Clarkston, Wash., a rural community on the Idaho border. She was an advocate for distressed students in the early days of the school's six-year trauma-sensitive schooling initiative, and has developed a course that pairs math instruction and social skills development. Her former students often drop in to tell her how much their time...