Blog

It has been nearly a decade since Congress passed the Mental Health Parity And Addiction Equity Act , with its promise to make mental health and substance abuse treatment just as easy to get as care for any other condition. Yet today, amid an opioid epidemic and a spike in the suicide rate, patients are still struggling to get access to treatment. That is the conclusion of a national study published Thursday by Milliman, a risk management and health care consulting company. The report was...

There is no shortage of media commentary discrediting “identity politics,” particularly the focus on Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, and immigrant communities calling for justice and equity. Economics is our real problem, a counter argument goes, not race, sex, gender, citizenship. But as author Nancy Isenberg points out in White Trash, “identity has always been a part of politics.” Laws have been written to oppress and exploit particular identities—Native Americans, Black Americans, Asians,...

Approximately a month ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Partners Behavioral Health Summit (PBHM), Teens in Toxic Times . The goal of the summit was to generate conversations about topics impacting today's adolescent youth. Participating in these conversations were individuals from of various systems who interact, advocate, and provide services to adolescent populations. During my presentation, Understanding the Impact of Childhood Traumatic Stress on Adolescents, I presented what...

In 2015, the most recent year for which we have comprehensive data, there were approximately 48,000 youth in residential placement facilities across the country. That’s down 55 percent from 1999, when our juvenile justice systems housed more than 100,000 young people. This significant decline suggests that the push for decarceration of youth is working. Fewer young people are being removed from their homes and communities for behaviors that come into conflict with the law. What we haven’t...

Despite making up the majority of California’s public school students, Latinos are still facing major challenges to achieving in school and graduating from college, a new report finds. But the report also highlights five bright spots in the LA County area — schools, districts, and programs that are helping Latinos succeed. In Los Angeles County, two school districts, a high school, and an early education center are modeling what needs to be done to close the achievement gap for Latino...

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, may lead to poor outcomes later in life. When a child is shot or beaten, for instance, it increases the likelihood that he or she might develop substance-use or eating disorders in adulthood. With that in mind, leaders in the Kansas City area have banded together to launch an initiative called Resilient KC, which has brought community members together to help battle childhood trauma and prevent those long-term health issues that can arise from such...

Earlier this year @Dawn Daum wrote to us when she was ready to share ACEs science with people in the organization she works in to make a case for moving towards more trauma-informed care for the benefit of the staff and those they serve. She was frustrated because almost all the training and resources she found were geared towards schools, clinical staff or to organizations working with children and families rather than ACE-impacted adults in the workplace and who are...

When educators learn about the devastating impact of ACES and toxic stress on a child's developing body, brain, and behavior, they often remark, "well, now what?" In this interactive workshop, participants learn to create a classroom that generates psychological safety and invites emotional and behavioral regulation via the nervous system. Co-presented with a seasoned educator, participants take a deep dive into a regulated learning environment; and they learn by doing. Participants will...

A few Sundays ago, at the first weekly service of New City Church in Minneapolis, the Bible wasn’t the only book Rev. Tyler Sit used to preach his sermon. The other text was How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. Peter Moskowitz’s book , which was published in March, takes readers into cities such as New York and San Francisco, where low-income residents of the inner city have been displaced by mostly white middle- and upper-class people moving...

During World War II 50,000 Finnish children were sent away from their parents to temporary foster care in Sweden. A new study builds the case that adverse events like this in childhood can have deep psychological consequences not only for those directly affected, but also for their descendants. Past research has shown that many of the Finnish war children who were evacuated went on to have a much higher rate of psychiatric hospitalization than the children who stayed. The new study, by the...

Between 2003 and 2013, an estimated 740,000 to 920,000 parents of children who are U.S. citizens were deported from the United States. In 2013, for example, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) reported that it deported 72,410 parents of American children. The pace of parental deportations was slower in 2016, when 28,860 parents were deported. The numbers for 2017 have not yet been reported, but many anticipate an increase given reports that ICE has targeted parents for...

When my daughter was a toddler, I regularly spilled milk in front of her during meal time. “Oops, oh well, no big deal, let’s clean it up!!” I would say in my high-pitched, goofy mom voice. Before she could speak, I sensed that she was wired for perfectionism (something very familiar to me), so I attempted to normalize day-to-day mistakes and to show her how easy it was to bounce back from them. We’re in the thick of the spilled-milk journey right now—learning to accept and embrace mistakes...