Category Archives: ACE Study

Oprah Winfrey addresses the long-term effects of trauma on CBS’s 60 Minutes

March 6, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences 8 Comments

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UPDATE:  Click here to view the segment (approximately 14 minutes) and the 60 Minutes Overtime interview with Oprah (about 5 minutes).
Oprah Winfrey addresses the long-term effects of childhood trauma this Sunday, March 11 on 60 Minutes (tune in on CBS at 7:00 p.m. ET). The word is spreading quickly about the potential impact of this 60 Minutes segment. One ACEs Connection member said “The cause now has an iconic “champion of champions.” This could be a significant game changer.” Another said we should all be prepared to respond afterwards with opeds and letters to the editors to local papers, meetings with legislators etc.

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A Kaiser pediatrician, wise to ACEs science for years, finally gets to use it

February 26, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Solutions 6 Comments

Dr. Suzanne Frank has known about the impact of childhood adversity on young lives for decades. She’s seen the fallout in the faces of young people huddled in beds at a children’s shelter where she worked years ago.

She’s seen it as the regional child abuse services and champion for the Permanente Medical Group.

And she’s seen it in hospital examination rooms where, as a member of the Santa Clara County’s Sexual Assault Response Team, she’s been called in to examine shell-shocked children and teens.

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ACEs science can prevent school shootings, but first people have to learn about ACEs science

February 21, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions 9 Comments

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David Hogg, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, speaks at a rally calling for more gun control. Photo by Jonathan Drake / Reuters

After 17 people, mostly teens, were shot and killed by another teen last week in Parkland, FL, what seems to be a real movement is growing, propelled by kids devastated by their friends’ deaths and wanting to prevent such a massacre from ever happening again.

Their rallies and marches and lie-downs probably won’t have much effect in the short-term, as some of the Parkland teens learned as they witnessed — and some of them wept during — today’s lightning vote by state lawmakers along party lines to end debate on an assault weapons ban, which killed any further consideration of the bill in the Florida legislature’s current session.

But their persistence can make a difference in the long run, especially if they — and we — widen this to include the dozens of kids shot on the streets of Chicago or Camden or in other communities every week. We can even broaden the approach to include the 200 people, including many children, who died in Syrian air strikes in the last two days, because the roots and solutions are the same.

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Book review: “The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity” by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris

January 23, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences 6 Comments

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Dr. Nadine Burke Harris debuted her book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, at the Philadelphia Free Library this evening in a talk and book signing.

This first stop in an ambitious book tour that crisscrosses the country reflects a mission that Burke Harris has pursued for nearly a decade: to spread the knowledge about the science of adverse childhood experiences, and about how people can use this knowledge to help solve our most intractable problems. (Her TED Talk has nearly 3.5 million page views.)

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Peer mentor uses her own ACEs story to teach med residents how to help traumatized patients

January 22, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences 10 Comments

O’Nesha Cochran, OHSU peer mentor

When O’Nesha Cochran teaches medical residents about adverse childhood experiences in patients, she doesn’t use a textbook.

Instead, the Oregon Health & Science University peer mentor walks in the room, dressed in what she describes as the “nerdiest-looking outfit” she can find.

And then she tells them her story.

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Montefiore Medical in Bronx screens 12,000+ kids for adverse childhood experiences

January 22, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences 1 Comment
Image courtesy of Creative Commons/Flickr/ Family drawing-Meggy

Since 2016, more than 12,000 children have been screened for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York, according to Miguelina German, the director of Quality & Research in the Pediatric Behavioral Health Integration Program and project director of Trauma Informed Care at the center.

Parents of infants are asked to fill out ACE scores for themselves and their infants.

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We can’t stop sex harassment by firing or incarcerating our way out; we can stop it by using ACEs science

December 20, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Neurobiology, Solutions 21 Comments

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So, Harvey Weinstein has gone to ground, along with Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and Kevin Spacey, to name a few, and they’re likely never to work in their chosen fields again. This week, federal Appeals Court Judge Alex Kosinski retired after 15 women, including former clerks, accused him of sexual misconduct. Do a search for “sexual harassment” and stories about dozens of men across a variety of professions appears.

Sexual harassment is everywhere – all professions, including higher education, and all walks of life (see the NYTimes article about women who work in Ford’s Chicago plants). The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that 60% of women report having experienced sexual harassment. That’s 45 million women. Forty-five million. And a much smaller, but still in the millions, number of men have also been sexually harassed by their male or female bosses.

The solutions so far — Fire them! Jail them! Destroy them! — might garner some headlines and short-term satisfaction. The solutions certainly fit our traditional approach of using blame, shame and punishment to attempt to change human behavior.

But we can’t fire or imprison our way out of this — it’s too big and too complex. Here’s why:

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