Blog

CHDI and Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health outlined a joint vision for improving child and population health in A Framework for Child Health Services: Promoting optimal health, development, and well-being for all children . This 2019 Framework builds on the original Framework for Child Health Services published in 2009. It highlights progress on implementing recommendations from the original Framework and puts forth new recommendations for integrating child health...

In 1864, nearing the end of the US Civil War, conditions in the Confederate prisoner of war camps were at their worst. There was such overcrowding in some camps that the prisoners, Union Army soldiers from the north, each had the square footage of a grave. Prisoner death rates soared. For those who survived, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life. They returned to society with impaired health, worse job prospects and shorter life expectancy . But the impact of these hardships...

There's a new ACEs-resiliency survey in town! It came out of a conversation between two physicians having a conversation on a bus. Here's the story about how it was developed, and how to use it. Pilots were done in a pediatric clinic, internal medicine, addiction treatment center, group therapy, and psychiatric practice. It's now being used in two community clinics.

The national Covington Curriculum Conference is returning to Connecticut this summer. Hosted in Stamford, Connecticut by Connecticut Women’s Consortium, the highly acclaimed, biannual conference provides facilitator training in addiction and trauma recovery group models for women, men, and girls in community and correctional settings. Dr. Stephanie Covington is a clinician, author, organizational consultant, and lecturer. Internationally recognized for her pioneering work in women's issues,...

Join us on May 1 for the 3rd Annual 4CA Policymaker Education Day! Register now: bit.ly/4CA2019Register

Childhood trauma may alter the structure of the brain in a way that makes clinical depression more likely to be severe and recurrent, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal. Some studies have shown a link between maltreatment and altered brain structure, while others have shown a link between maltreatment and major depressive disorder. The new study is the first to directly establish an association between maltreatment experiences, brain structural alterations...

IF I TOLD you that one in four New Hampshire children would experience serious, negative health outcomes later in life unless we put in place a proven system of prevention today, would you support investing in that prevention? This is actually an urgent question for New Hampshire, as a state, to respond to, as a recent survey of New Hampshire adults found that those who had experienced early adversity are in poorer physical and mental health than their peers who did not experience adversity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta has announced an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Research & Evaluation Fellowship opportunity that resides in the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) at CDC. The new fellowship position reflects a growing ACEs capacity within the CDC. The announcement states “The selected candidate will assist with research related to evaluating comprehensive community-based prevention strategies for primary...

New data on health across the U.S. shows that high housing costs are harming Americans’ health – and that some communities are affected more than others. The 2019 County Health Rankings , an annual collaborative report from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shows that 11 percent of U.S. households are severely burdened by housing costs. This means that more than 800,000 households spend at least half of their income on housing. In...

I have talked about childhood trauma a lot in previous articles so I won’t go into the mechanism at length here. But in short, our experiences and environment in our formative years shape us into who we are as adults. As children, we experience many traumas and “microtraumas” that many of us are not even aware of nor identify them as such. Dissociation , after all, is our primary response to childhood trauma. And so, we carry trauma from our formative years long into adulthood. This trauma...

In many a company, you’ve heard the talk about unconscious bias, and likely attended trainings and so forth, but are these efforts making a real difference the way we see and treat each other? In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do , Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt reveals the latest research and data, much of it her own, on racial bias and how it impacts us all every day. A Stanford social psychologist and MacArthur “Genius” award recipient, she is one of...

We visit Miami to talk with Dr. Cheryl Holder of Florida Clinicians For Climate Action, and Jorge, a fruit vendor who is feeling the effects of increasingly hot days firsthand. [For more on this story by LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, go to https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706295403/how-climate-change-is-affecting-residents-health-in-miami ]