March 2019

M agic happens when we engage with our inner worlds from a place of curiosity rather than fear. All those horrible human tangles of anxiety, doubt, resentment and pain can unravel when pen meets paper in the spirit of enquiry. What’s more, when we choose to share this kind of writing with the world, it helps others free themselves from their own emotional traps. Carefully chosen words can ease pain, and they do so for both writer and consumer. You’re reading this article on Medium, so...

The connection I’m building with my students starts every day with a box of Cocoa Puffs. Name-brand cereal may not sound all that special, but it’s something most of my students can’t afford. It’s something I remember longing for when I was a kid. Even though our school serves breakfast in the classroom to all students, I bring a group of boys from our K-4 school together for a special breakfast to fuel their day with a dose of self-esteem. We eat and we talk, and they get to start their day...

Gloria Brown didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Her husband, Arthur Brown, 79, has Alzheimer’s disease and had spent most of the night pacing their bedroom, opening and closing drawers, and putting on and taking off his jacket. So Gloria, 73, asked a friend to take Arthur out for a few hours one recent afternoon so she could grab a much-needed nap. She was lucky that day because she didn’t need to call upon the home health aide who comes to their house twice a week. The price of paying for...

“I don’t recognize you.” This was the first thought I had when my daughter was born. She didn’t look like me (at first), and I soon learned that she didn’t act like me, either. I was a quiet and content baby, or so I’d been told; my daughter was anything but. On our first night home, she cried for hours while my husband and I tried everything we could to calm her, from rocking to singing to feeding to changing her. Eventually she did soothe, but my daughter was letting us know, loudly and...

A pair of recent suicide deaths in Parkland, Fla., serve as a stark reminder of the lingering effects of trauma — and underscore the importance of providing long-term support to those who are living with its consequences. Just days after 19-year-old Sydney Aiello, who survived the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, died by suicide , police confirmed that an unnamed current student at the high school had also died by “apparent suicide .” Police did not...

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.