Blog

Last week, at the California Home Visiting Summit , about 500 amazing front-line caregivers gathered to share their experiences and learn about the latest research and practice. I was invited to give a presentation about "the unified science of ACEs", which includes the epidemiology of adverse childhood experiences (the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and all the other subsequent ACE surveys), the neurobiology of toxic stress, the long-term biomedical and epigenetic consequences of...

To help researchers, journalists and policymakers locate available research on the education of black males, University of Texas College of Education Professors Louis Harrison and Anthony Brown launched The Black Male Education Research Collection , a new website. African American males face many obstacles in education: disproportionate dropout, expulsion and suspension rates, overrepresentation in special education, and underrepresentation in gifted education. Yet research on the issues...

Last December, U.S. District Judge Janis Jack ruled that the Texas foster care system was inadequate to the point of being unconstitutional. Most everyone is in agreement on what the major issues are: poorly trained foster parents, overwhelming case loads, high staff turnover, low pay. Whether or not the political wherewithal exists to fix the problem is another matter. “Texas’s foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades,” Judge Jack’s opinion reads. On this episode...

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the future of mental health interview series. More than 110 interviews have appeared! You can find the complete roster with live links to the interviews here . If you’ve missed some of the interviews, do take a look at the roster: there are many valuable and eye-opening interviews to be had. In this post I’d like to provide a few concluding thoughts, including a few top tips for reducing mental distress. If you’d like to keep abreast of the future of mental health...

[First of three articles] Ten years ago, Patsy Hite, 70, rarely left her home at night. “I heard a lot of sirens so I always kept to myself,” she said. Hite lives in the Highlands, a 40-block section in Longview, a city in Cowlitz County in southwestern Washington. The Highlands is home to about 5,000 residents. The neighborhood is adjacent to an industrial district, and was hit hard by the loss of jobs in the timber and manufacturing industries. Long-term unemployment has brought blight,...

[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...

Social activist and former foster care youth Shenandoah Chefalo was forced to move 50 times during her childhood, and that experience coupled with her ideas to improve the foster care system that she survived resulted in her book, “Garbage Bag Suitcase.” The book, which took over four years of research and writing to complete, describes Chefalo’s dysfunctional upbringing and journey through the foster care system. She also offers insight into the problems and potential solutions surrounding...

Three years ago, federal Judge Shira Scheindlin declared the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” operations unconstitutional . An audit of these stops found that black and Latino New Yorkers were approached and patted down by police at a far higher rate than white New Yorkers, yet they rarely were found to be in illegal possession of guns or drugs. As a result, then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly ordered the police force to wind down “stop and frisk” practices, which it did...

T he Saturday morning after St. Patrick’s Day, 22 patients are locked up in a nondescript detox facility on the outskirts of a Midwestern suburb. A couple of the men and women checked themselves in; a few more arrived in a police car; the rest were brought here by a worried friend, partner, or parent. A trio of volunteers from a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous has just arrived to hold a meeting. Those willing to join the circle recite the Serenity Prayer, listen to someone read "How it...

17-year-old Lew Blank was fiddling around with the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map when he discovered something disturbing about Wisconsin, where he lives: More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails . Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee. Sharing this info on the Young,...

“I am already dead! I have been buried.” said a young south Asian girl on the psychiatric ward. Prior to her admission she had stopped going to school, and instead isolated herself in her room spending hours on the internet searching for her grave. She was not eating much and losing weight. There had been occasions when she wandered off at night. With poor eye contact and slow speech, she added: “I can feel the worms crawling inside my body.” After an assessment she was found to have...

For years, Teri Barila had tried to coax newspaper reporters in Walla Walla, Washington , to write about brain science, ACEs, and resilience. They didn’t bite. Then, on a crisp December evening, 1600 people—many of them inspired by years of community organizing—crammed the town’s largest venue for a screening of Paper Tigers, James Redford’s documentary about the dramatic reboot of a local alternative school after its principal became an advocate of trauma-informed care. Suddenly, reporters...