Dr. Ken Epstein has been in the social services sector for nearly four decades and has witnessed firsthand the long-term effects of trauma. As both the son and father of fellow social workers, the work runs in his blood. He has been frontline staff at a residential facility for youth with severe mental and emotional challenges, a therapist, a family and couples therapy professor and director of the Child, Youth and Family System of Care for the City of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. Now, he’s helping Bay Area health clinics screen for and address childhood trauma through the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), led by Center for Care Innovations (CCI) and made possible by Genentech.
Trauma is pervasive. Studies show that one in seven children in California experience trauma by age five (Children Now, 2018), and research links adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – incidences of abuse or neglect, household dysfunction, and community violence – to an increased likelihood of negative health outcomes. In youth, trauma can cause behavioral issues, asthma, and infections; as adults, those same individuals are at greater risk of heart, lung, and autoimmune disease, obesity, mood disorders, and substance use disorders. This is magnified when you include income disparities and the impact of systemic and structural inequities.
Florida State University has launched a new online curriculum for a professional certification in trauma and resilience.
The curriculum was developed by the Clearinghouse on Trauma and Resilience within the Institute for Family Violence Studies at the FSU College of Social Work in conjunction with the FSU Center for Academic and Professional Development.
“This training addresses a gap in the knowledge base of human services professionals,” said Clearinghouse Director Karen Oehme. “Many professionals do not receive training on the impact of how to provide services to someone who is experiencing the harmful effects of trauma.”
The course enables professionals to develop the knowledge and skills they need to understand the impact of adult and childhood trauma, along with the keys to resilience. Participants will learn crucial information to improve service delivery to clients, students, human services recipients, patients and other members of the public.
The self-paced curriculum includes 20 hours of course content and 10 chapters of research-based readings, case scenarios, multimedia materials, assignments and quizzes.
The multidisciplinary course has been approved for continuing education credits for a diverse range of professionals including licensed counselors, social workers, nurses, dentists and lawyers. Participants outside of Florida can submit their certification to their own licensing board to determine credit awarded.
“The course is designed for professionals in a wide variety of fields because individuals in all different environments have exposure to trauma,” Oehme said. “We wanted to provide an economical, evidence-based resource to the public for those who want to enhance their professional knowledge, skills and career potential.”
The curriculum is based on developing an understanding of adverse childhood experiences and the associated long-term negative effects. The training offers a powerful new perspective on trauma-informed approaches to effective service delivery.
“Florida State University recognizes that professionals from all backgrounds have the ability to help individuals build resilience,” said Jim Clark, dean of the College of Social Work. “But first they have to learn about why resilience is so crucial in treating the negative impacts of trauma.” Clark said that FSU realized the need for such a course as it was developing the Student Resilience Proect.
“Our community partners have told us time and time again that they need research-informed resources,” Clark said. “It was a natural next step for the Clearinghouse on Trauma and Resilience to develop such a course.”
Faculty from across Florida State’s campus participated in the review of the new course.
Mimi Graham at the Center for Prevention & Early Intervention Policy, a leader in trauma-informed education, served as a reviewer, along with 10 other faculty members.
“FSU is a leader in trauma and resilience education for the public,” Graham said. “This course ensures that crucial information is available to our community leaders, so they can make trauma-informed decisions.”
Joedrecka Brown Speights at the College of Medicine said, “It’s important for human services professionals to keep up with the new research on brain development so they remember there is always hope for healing after trauma.”
Chapters in the certification cover the mental and physical effects of trauma, cultural considerations in trauma research, skills for addressing trauma and an interdisciplinary approach to building resilience.
Professionals are required to review all of the course material and pass the chapter quizzes and final exam. When professionals complete the training, they will receive their professional certification from the Center for Academic and Professional Development.
Discounts for the 20-hour course are offered for FSU alumni and veterans. For questions about fees and enrollment, contact the FSU Center for Academic & Professional Development at resilience@capd.fsu.edu or (850) 644-7545.
But if we want to prevent shootings, asking about motive will just get you a useless answer to the wrong question. Police might feel as if they have an explanation for why 19-year-old Santino William Legan murdered three people, and why 21-year-old Patrick Crusius murdered 22 people. But motives don’t explain the roots of why those three young men, or any other mass shooters or bombers, foreign or domestic, start their journey as innocent babies and end up on a road to killing people. And in those roots, are our solutions.
If you use the lens of the science of adverse childhood experiences, the answer reveals itself, and usually pretty quickly.
They’re the forgotten, the 2.3 million people in US prisons. The overwhelming majority of them have experienced significant childhood trauma. Before you click out of here, this isn’t another boo-hoo story, as some of you might describe it, about the dismal state of our corrections system, for inmates and guards alike. (Oh, yes, it is profoundly dismal.) This is a story about how one tiny part of it isn’t so dismal, and actually addresses head-on the fact that most (91 percent) of the approximately 2.3 million prisoners will finish their sentences and go home. To your neighborhood. So….wouldn’t you want the prisons to help these guys and gals so that they, and by definition, we, come out happier and more well-adjusted than when they went in?
Well, yea-uh.
Ok. Just in case you glossed over it, let’s go back to that sentence about childhood trauma. It is precisely why the 2,300 inmates at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Wash., ended up there. Over the last 20 years some profound, intense research revealed that people who have a lot of childhood adversity have seven times the risk of becoming an alcoholic, 12 times the risk of attempted suicide, twice the risk of cancer and heart attacks. They’re more violent, more likely to be victims of violence, have more broken bones, more marriages, and use prescription drugs more often than people who have no childhood adversity. And those are just the few drops in the bucket of how childhood trauma affects people’s lives.
By Darlene Byrne, Judge, 126th Judicial District Court The comments in this paper are solely the opinions of the writer and no other organization.
As a judge in Texas who has presided over many hundreds of child abuse and neglect cases since 2003, I have seen firsthand what the trauma of removing a child from a parent can do to the child. The parent-child relationship is one of our most sacred and precious fundamental and constitutional rights, as recognized by many U.S. and Texas Supreme Court cases.
Sentencing innocent children at our U.S. borders, with instant removal from their parents with no notice, no warning, and no due process goes against the moral code of this nation. The events taking place at our southern border are no less traumatic for the affected children than cases in which a child is removed from their parents because of allegations of abuse and neglect.
Central American asylum seekers, including a Honduran girl, 2, and her mother, are taken into custody near the U.S.-Mexico border in June in McAllen, Texas.John Moore/Getty Images
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Separating children from their parents or caregivers hurts children. Between April 19 and May 31, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents. As Celeste Fremon reported in WitnessLa, that number has now passed 2,300 children (and is increasing by more than 60/day), with another 11,000 locked up in everything from large cages to a converted Walmart.
“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma,” says a petition signed by more than 9,000 mental health professionals and 172 organizations.
Julie Kurtz, co-director, trauma-informed practices in early childhood education, WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies/photo by Laurie Udesky
A hug may be comforting to many children, but for a child who has experienced trauma, it may not feel safe.
That’s an example used by Julie Kurtz, co-director of trauma-informed practices in early childhood education at the WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS), as she begins a trauma training session. Her audience, preschool teachers and staff of the San Francisco, CA-based Wu Yee Children’s Services at San Francisco’s Women’s Building, listen attentively.
Kurtz leads them into a description of how a child’s young brain functions, how young children – regardless of whether they have experienced trauma or not — live in their reptile brain.
