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Training to help children who face early childhood trauma is to be offered to all schools in Wales. Teachers will be taught how to support pupils who have adverse experiences such as family breakdown, bereavement or physical, sexual or substance abuse. It follows a pilot project at three primary schools in Bridgend county. [For more on this story, go to http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-43345927 ]

NEW CASTLE (March 12, 2018) – The Department of Health and Social Services is partnering with Wilmington University to train more than 1,000 frontline DHSS staff in better assessing and addressing the needs of clients statewide, many of whom have experienced trauma in their lives, during the kickoff of a yearlong Trauma-Informed Approach initiative. Wilmington University’s nine-week training session for 26 supervisors and trainers from the DHSS Divisions of Social Services, Child Support...

When Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people, mostly students, in a Parkland, Fla., high school on Valentine's Day, the shooting became a rallying cry for gun control. For those familiar with ACEs science, however, the details of Cruz's life, including the recent death of his mother, were warning signs. ACE is short for adverse childhood experiences. Kathy Powderly, executive director of the Hagerstown Area Religious Council, recently attended a training session about ACEs. She remembers...

Initially when I started visiting my Memory Forest I was compelled to wander down the same path. But as I got more comfortable and felt safer among the memories, I started venturing off the well-worn paths and started making new trails. This has been my experience of neuroplasticity and recovery from interpersonal trauma and ACEs.

Recently I finished J.D. Vance's excellent Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , a book that's part sociological analysis about poor white Americans, and part memoir about growing up with a drug-addicted mother and all the crappy crap that goes with that. I come from the opposite corner of the socioeconomic spectrum (well, the "socio" part of the poor spectrum). Vance was Hillbilly Poor and I was Hippie Poor, but my experience was about 90% the same as his. When media...

Good morning! Did anyone see this study? https://www.inc.com/dana-severson/after-studying-lives-of-724-men-for-79-years-harvard-reveals-1-biggest-secret-to-success-happiness.html It is more supporting documentation to the Enjoy Life Community® concept that I had developed and would love to work with people of like mind as I have found here in the AcesConnection network to implement. I truly believe it is a solution for any community -- a school community, neighborhood or workplace. The...

Recovery is not a term reserved only for those who choose and maintain the path of complete abstinence. Inside a theatre, a stark visual appears: Each year, only 1% of addicts are able to kick heroin and stay clean. This quickly cuts to images of my former self deliberately counting syringes at the needle exchange site. I see a shadow I recognize as myself in active addiction. I can barely discern my gender, my clothing keenly styled to blend into the streets that I called home. As the...

More people in the United States are on antidepressants , as a percentage of the population, than any other country in the world. And yet the drugs’ efficacy has been hotly debated. Some believe that the short-term benefits are much more modest than widely thought, and that harms may outweigh benefits in the long run. Others believe that they work, and that they can be life-changing. Settling this debate has been much harder than you might think. [For more on this story by Aaron E. Carroll,...

Last June, The Atlantic published “ My Family’s Slave ,” a harrowing reflection by the journalist Alex Tizon on his experience of being raised by Eudocia Tomas Pulido, or, as she was known to Tizon, “Lola.” Pulido wasn’t in chains, Tizon wrote, yet “no other word but slaveencompassed the life she lived.” The story moved millions of readers. Today, as part of our special report about forced work, “ The Unfree ,” and with assistance from the nonprofit National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA),...

"It angers me how we keep going down the same path [with respect to policing] expecting a different result. We believe over-incarceration and over-policing leads to less crime, yet we have more crime,” Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, told me recently. Lumumba, elected last June with the endorsement of the political organization Our Revolution, added that his plans for criminal-justice reform are manifold; for instance, he supports a proposed ordinance to reduce penalties...

We’ve all seen it happen: An older friend or family member retires, is diagnosed with a serious illness or loses a spouse. Suddenly, this individual’s world is altered, sometimes seemingly beyond recognition. He has reached a fork in the road; will he get stuck or find a way to regroup and move on? In a new book, “ The End of Old Age ,” Dr. Marc Agronin, a geriatric psychiatrist, calls this moment an “age point” — an event that disrupts an older person’s life and challenges the person’s...