Healing Horizons: Weekly News & Research - April 4th, 2024
The latest news in trauma-informed care, positive and adverse childhood experiences, and psychological safety hosted by Bri Twombly and Alison Cebulla.
Here are the news stories and research we featured:
New collaborative for a trauma-informed Chicago
“The Collaborative for a Trauma-Informed Chicago (CTI Chicago) is a new transformation initiative funded by CDPH’s Office of Violence Prevention and is building on Chicago’s long commitment to integrate trauma-informed practices.”
KY bill would strengthen trauma-informed resources in schools
“The bill has received scrutiny for its proposal to allow schools to establish so-called ‘guardians’ programs, made up of honorably discharged military veterans and retired or former law enforcement officers to address a statewide shortage of School Resource Officers.”
“A coalition of community and medical leaders is pushing for systemic change in Cincinnati when it comes to addressing and preventing trauma. The goal is to address root causes of trauma to better manage its impact and improve equity.”
Supporting organizational transformation through the HOPE framework | Recapping the 2024 HOPE Summit
“Last week, the HOPE National Resource Center (NRC) wrapped up its Fourth Annual HOPE Summit – the HOPE Transformation.”
Building Psychological Safety in Your Team - CliftonStrengths
“A psychologically safe workplace is one in which employees have permission to speak up, to ‘tell the truth, whatever that looks like.’”
Organizations’ attempts to improve wellbeing at work are too narrowly focussed and fail to account for the diverse and individualistic ways employees cultivate wellbeing.”
Psychological safety bill back before Rhode Island lawmakers
Rhode Island lawmakers have reintroduced legislation intended to protect workers from psychological abuse – such as bullying – on the job. The Workplace Psychological Safety Act (H.B. 8044 and S.B. 2473) would make it unlawful for an employer or employee to “engage in psychological abuse … that creates a toxic work environment in which a reasonable person would find it intolerable” to perform regular work duties, or that could cause injury or jeopardize future career prospects.
Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense
“When a serious health or social problem is identified as both prevalent and in need of attention, a common response is to propose that various systems implement routine identification, such as universal screening. However, these well-intentioned responses often fail to consider the key requirements necessary to determine whether benefits outweigh harms.”
“In the meta-analysis, as compared to those without ACEs, those with 4 ≥ ACEs were twice as likely to have ever used tobacco (OR = 2.16, 95 %CI:1.73–2.70) and approximately four times more likely to have used tobacco currently (OR = 3.73, 95 %CI:2.69–5.18).”
A Scoping Review of Positive Childhood Experiences: Measurement and Evidence
“Taken together, findings reveal heterogeneity in measurement of positive childhood experiences, highlighting the need for consistent operationalization of positive childhood experiences. Agreement and consistency in the measurement of positive childhood experiences will improve interpretation of research findings and appropriate implications for policy.”
“Adolescents with no ACEs had significantly better MHW than those with one or more ACE. Having six or more PCEs was associated with better MHW in adolescents with and without ACEs. PCEs significantly moderated the association between ACEs and depression. Effect sizes were larger for PCEs than ACEs in relation to depression, mental well-being, and life satisfaction.”
The Permanente Journal released their Special Collection Trauma-informed Health Care
“The study found that metaphors may be efficient and effective tools for discussing ACEs, as they can improve clinician communication and patient understanding.”
“Study results suggest that clinical and preventive interventions for suicidality should target the influence of racism and adverse experiences and the negative relational schemas they induce. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).”
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Audio Transcript:
Alison Cebulla 00:03
Hello, everyone. My name is Alison Cebulla.
Bri Twombly 00:08
And I'm Bri Twombly.
Alison Cebulla 00:10
And welcome to healing horizons. And so this is where well, let me introduce you to attend collective where consultants at 10 Collective and attend collective we're creating a world where people genuinely care for one another. And your organization can hire us to implement trauma informed care and psychological safety based programs and policies to better care for your employees, and in turn for the communities that you serve.
Bri Twombly 00:43
So each week on what we are calling healing horizons, we are going to share some of the latest news as well as research in trauma informed care, positive and adverse childhood experiences, and psychological safety. So I'm gonna hand it over to Allison to get us started for today. Awesome.
Alison Cebulla 01:00
So today is Thursday, April 4 2024. And just a heads up, we will be talking about trauma. And sometimes that involves violence. So we just put together a list of things that have been in the news the last week or so related to trauma informed care, adverse childhood experiences, positive childhood experiences, psychological safety, so that you could get an idea of which programs and policies are happening out there in the world. Maybe it inspires you and the work that you're doing at your organization, or maybe gives you a little bit of hope that these interventions are moving forward. So we're going to highlight a few that we saw, as well as some some of the latest research in this area. So to start us off, there was some news from the Chicago Department of Public Health. And this is pretty exciting. It's a collaborative for a trauma informed Chicago is a new transformational initiative, funded by the Department of Public Health's Office of Violence Prevention. And they're going to build a lot. They have a long commitment, long term program for trauma informed practices in the city of Chicago. So this is really exciting news, very curious to see what will come out of this. What I like about it is that it's a cross sector collaborative collaboration among different organizations and initiatives. And the goal is that they want Chicagoans to feel safe, and to heal and to be able to thrive in a city that is working together to prevent and address the impacts of interpersonal, generational and systems harm caused by structural racism and trauma. It really liked the holistic sound of this initiative. I really liked that the Department of Public Health is involved. Having having to earn a Master's in Public Health myself, this is such a nice, well rounded and holistic discipline that tends to take into account upstream solutions and cross sector collaboration. So it's always nice to see that. I'm really curious to see how the trainings, it looks like it's going to be primarily like trainings, events, advocacy, and some research, I'll be really curious to know like, who gets the trainings? And in what context like Where will they hear about them? Or where like, will it be at Family Resource Center's, that's traditionally I think what we're seeing across the United States is that these trainings are being done at centers that serve parents, sometimes that can be a limitation. Like we'd like to see those these trainings happen, like within the Department of Public Health, for example, or within the Department of Social Services. So, um, I'll be curious to see what they ended up what they ended up doing. Um, so another piece of news is that, Kentucky um, so this was a piece of news for March 11. There's a new bill in Kentucky that would strengthen trauma informed services in schools. This one I'm a little curious about, I would love to know the backstory as to how they chose this particular intervention. Like, was there a literature review done? Did they review everything and decided this was the best possible thing? Because the article says this is a trauma informed intervention, when you kind of dig into the nuts and bolts of what's in there. And it has to do with up having these Guardian roles in K through 12 schools, which I think are supposed to be like a safe adult, that student could share something with like if they're having suicidal ideation. And I'm, I'm really curious about about Guardian programs if they've been to accessible other states, this would be something that I would have to do more research on. But when I see a piece of news like this, that's like the question that comes into my head is, is this an evidence based intervention. And certainly, we're excited to see people in Kentucky thinking about trauma informed services. But I am very curious as to how they, they decided upon this one. So okay, nearby, right nearby the city of Cincinnati. This piece of news came out just a few days ago on April 1. And there is a coalition of community and medical leaders that are pushing for systemic change in Cincinnati to addressing and preventing trauma, we love to see the word preventing, it's not enough to treat it or screen for it. Let's prevent it. And so the goal is to address root causes of trauma to better manage its impact and improve equity. And so they're looking for a cultural shift within the city for how leaders approach trauma, we love to hear that leaders are involved and that the cultural shift needs to come from leadership. Because that can often be a huge barrier to change. And oftentimes, when leaders understand the impacts of trauma they can make and implement better programs and policies. So they're kind of looking to Baltimore who passed a healing Cities Initiative. A few years back, and maybe hoping to replicate this model. A city council member named Zeke Cohen said, city leaders spend way too much time thinking about how to better police us when you should be thinking about how to prevent trauma from occurring in our lives in the first place. That is, that's the kind of thinking that we love. And so the healing city Act, which made Baltimore a healing Cities Initiative, mandates that city agencies be trained in trauma informed care. And so the questions that popped up for me is how consistent will that training be? If there's employee turnover? Are the new employees also getting that training? Is this a long term program? Or is it more just like a couple up front, and people are not getting that later? As we know, there's a lot of turnover in social services. So I'm very, those are the questions that pop up in my mind when I hear about interventions like this, what is the plan for sustainability. Um, another idea for Cincinnati is to implement dashboard, an opportunity and equity dashboard that looks at public data that focuses on health, homeownership, educational outcomes, and other pieces just to get a nice snapshot of what's going on in the city so that you can actually then address the various issues.
Bri Twombly 07:51
Often things Allison, and I think I'm just hearing you talk thinking about like systemic and policy change. And I think there's like a thread that goes through a lot of what we're talking about today of like, the need for this, like systemic change and things through policy to happen as well to really kind of change what's going on in our country and the experiences that people are happening. So I want to start by highlighting the healthy outcomes for positive experiences, or hope for short, their resource center, which is part of Tufts Medical Center, held their fourth annual summit a few weeks ago. So if you happen to register for that, I just want to remind you that you have access to all of those session recordings. And historically, they have made recordings of all of the sessions available to the general public, later on in the year. So I would kind of maybe go check out their website, sign up for their newsletters, those types of things. So you can be alerted when those come up, because there are some really great sessions that happen every single year. So just a little bit about kind of hope, because that will inform kind of what I'm talking about a little bit, is they developed what they call the four building blocks of hope. And that's based on research on positive childhood experiences. So those are relationships safe, equitable and stable environment, social and civic engagement and emotional growth. And why we want to talk about positive childhood experiences and think about them is because they're really important because they help to buffer against the impact or the development of toxic stress that people can end up developing from experiencing kind of chronic trauma. So a lot of the keynote, the keynotes there, as well as the kind of breakout sessions discussed that need for systemic change. And we need that systemic change again, to reduce retraumatization for people and to help to create more healthy and equitable systems. I want to highlight one of the keynotes. So in this keynote, Leonard Burton, who is the president of the Center for The study of social policy, he talked about the need to transform early childhood care, using anti racist policies and practices. There was a quote that really stuck out to me in his talk, he said systems need to undertake a fundamental shift from gatekeepers, where you have this social control and enjoy that social control, to gate breakers and opportunity openers, creating space and opportunities for people to thrive. So I really, really just loved everything that was in that chunk of quote, because systems or programs often end up creating things with good intentions a lot of the time, but they end up telling people what they can and cannot do, they require a lot of hoops for people to jump through to be able to get enrolled in program. And they also give the provider and the systems the power, as well as that appearance that the provider or the system knows best, and that some people are worthy of having their needs met and others aren't. But when, in reality, really, you know, families and individuals, they're, they're the experts of their lives, they know what is best for themselves and for their families. And they should be the one to have that power to be able to make those decisions. And a great example to really highlight that that he talked about was the child tax credit increase that happened in 2021, and how that provided families with financial support to help to raise their family. This program was really unique, and it gave people the money, it didn't tell them how to spend the money. Rather, it gave families flexibility, autonomy and freedom to be able to spend the money in the way that kind of best met the family's needs, which helped to remove barriers. It helped to alleviate stress for families. And another good quote from this keynote was that it allowed them to parent as they'd like to parent. And that quote was actually from a parent in the program. And I really like the building blocks of hope it gives me a lot to think about, it gives me different ways to think about how to use them. And often they are really used with children and families. But they're really good to think about in terms of leadership development, supervision practices, and building caring communities within workplaces. So when we think about things like flexible work schedules, paid parental leave, livable wages, all of those things align with the building blocks of hope. So I was just really excited to kind of attend the sessions that I attended during that and to be able to watch some of the recorded sessions that I wasn't able to attend, just to continue to learn more about the interventions about people who are taking that and putting it into practice, and doing other research on positive childhood experiences. And positive childhood experiences will be another thing that you'll see is like a thread in what we're talking about today. Um, I think our other news is in the area of psychological safety. And so there was a recent podcast that was hosted by Gallup and Clifton Strengths that talked about building psychological safety within your team. And they really use and one of the speakers was from Australia, and was really able to talk about the work that they're doing in Australia related to psychological safety. And in Australia, psychological safety has been elevated to be as important as physical safety. I was like, yes, yeah. Wow. Um, and so just really, like exciting and interesting to hear about kind of what's going on in Australia specific to psychological safety. And kind of the panelists talked about how kind of lack of psychological safety can show up in the workplace, through things like lack of role clarity, job demands, being too heavy, having poor support for managers in the organization on fear work practices, poor organizational change management. So so many of the things that I feel like we're hearing from those in the like American workforce right now, and probably the world's workforce, of justice, different things that are making people feel burned out, it's impacting people's mental health. And so just really important to think about, and that importance of psychological safety. They also shared what they called quick connections, as a tool to support psychological safety, which they described as short opportunities to check in with employees around three different things. So those three things are how are they doing? So how was that person doing as an individual, like outside of work, just like,
Alison Cebulla 15:04
it's amazing how it just doesn't happen. Like it just, you know, I don't know, it's so simple. Yeah.
Bri Twombly 15:10
Like, how are you doing as a person, what is going on in your life? What is on your mind? Just being able to engage in that relationship, and that way as if they are an actual human being? Who matters. I'm also asking them how work is going and what support they need. So not expecting for them to come to you all the time with those questions, or like I need some support, but proactively checking in on how things are going. Are there barriers? Are there things getting in the way, what may I be able to do to kind of help to support that and to move that ahead. So that helps to alleviate some stress for people. And these quick connections can really be used as tools to do things like increased engagement, performance, and psychological safety. And these strategies are really important because bullying and harassment, unfortunately, are really common in a lot of workplaces right now. So if we're not checking in on these things, we're not creating psychologically safe work environments, those are going to continue. But when we have these opportunities, when we're building the psychological safety, we increase engagement, and we decrease bullying and harassment, which ultimately results in healthier, more caring workplaces, for people. So I really just loved some of the examples that they gave of what looks like an on psychologically safe workplace. And here's an intervention that you can take right now and go try. And of course, when you think about that, you want to make sure that you're doing it in an authentic way, right, because it's a lot about that relationship piece. So if you're just going in as a checklist, if I ask these three questions, that's not going to create that psychological safety, we want to really be creating that genuine relationship, to be curious to have that empathy for people. So all of those important skills as well. The other piece of kind of news related to psychological safety was that there was a kind of paper released called the beyond workplace Wellbeing Framework. And that was at of the department for psychological and behavioral sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science. And really, what they did is they they looked across the United Kingdom, it was a really large qualitative study that they did. And they were really looking at workplace initiatives related to wellbeing. And they were finding that as individuals, we all want different things related to our wellbeing. So if an organization is saying, Here's a meditation day, or here's bagels for breakfast, that may feel good for one person, but it may not feel great for another person may not be what they need. And instead of really focusing on well being, the focus should be on creating psychological safety. That is the thing that's going to keep people working there that's going to help people feel safe, that's really going to support their mental health, and helps to reduce those things that can cause what they called ill being so those things like bullying and harassment, not feeling valued, all of those types of things. They also specifically mentioned, being able to give employees autonomy of how and when they work. So again, that's been like a big discussion, especially since COVID. Just around what what does autonomy look like? Do you need to be in the office? Can you be out of the office? Do you need to work 40 hours? Are you getting your job done? Like? What do all of those things look like? So just a really good, I think kind of conversation starter and paper around, let's stop doing these short term kind of interventions around well being. And let's think of this long term, that creation of psychological safety that helps to retain employees and really help. No, no more pizza parties, or we can do pizza parties. Sometimes pizza parties can still be good, but we don't just want a pizza party once a year is not doing it when we're getting bullied. Right in our team meeting. So yeah, yep.
Alison Cebulla 19:19
I'm great. It's always good to know that someone out there, even if it's not here in the United States, is asking the hard questions around psychological safety. Although another piece of news is that the workplace psychological safety act that was introduced in Massachusetts has not passed yet has also now been introduced in Rhode Island. So that is great. You can follow them on LinkedIn and go to their website to learn how to put that emotion in your state. They have a toolkit for that. So we really think that will be a great thing to have protections For employees? Absolutely, yeah. So we are now going to talk about peer reviewed research that has come out in these areas. So we have a few to share today. Of course, there are so many, so we're just highlighting a few. So this is a study that came out in the Journal of child abuse and neglect the February 2024 issue by a group from the University of Calgary in the Department of Psychiatry. And the title is routine screening for adverse childhood experiences, Aces still doesn't make sense. And this is a juicy one. Yeah, it really does. We actually were talking about maybe we want to do a whole webinar just on the ideas presented in this paper, because it's really, really important to make sure that we're being critical. Hopefully, Aces, the ACES aware and other aces screening programs will end up being great interventions that do a lot of good. However, we don't know that still. And so it's really, really important to ask critical questions, and to make sure that these programs are being evaluated, and to think through some of the biases. So this paper does an amazing job of highlighting all of the things that we need to be critically thinking about before we implement screening interventions. So a few highlights, I'm just being that they're really calling for randomized control trials. So this would be where they have a population of patients who have consented to be a part of the study that some of them are receiving the ESA screening, and some of them are not. And then it's random as to, you know, whether they know which part of the maybe the intervention that they're getting. And this is really kind of the gold standard in research in a lot of ways. They mentioned in this paper that's not often used for psychosocial interventions, but it has been. And so there is precedent on how to create a study like this. So they cited that there have been studies in the past on screening for intimate partner violence. And so they did three randomized control trials of intimate partner violence screening in three countries, the United States, New Zealand and Canada, and found that none of these studies found significant positive outcomes for the screened population. And of course, there's a whole discussion that can be said as to why that is many, many, many reasons. Perhaps they were not given the resources, or when it comes to intimate partner violence. This is actually well known to be something that's very, very hard to turn around, actually known in public health as being something that's once someone has gotten into a dynamic a little bit where they're used to having this sort of violence in their relationships, it can be very hard to turn that around on the individual level. So screening may not actually help. So this is a nice precedent to look at. Similar study could be designed for Adverse Childhood Experiences screening, and since we know that it wasn't effective with this other intervention, would be really good to make sure that we're doing that for this one. Um, so they also mentioned the potential harm from psychosocial interventions, that there is a pattern of higher rates of antisocial behavior, among some youth exposed to group based interventions under certain conditions, with peer deviancy training being one of the identified mechanisms, so again, it's a really big topic, but I think it's really important to understand that not all psychosocial interventions are proven to be safe and effective. So there can be harms from it, I'm very, we'll have to do a webinar.
Bri Twombly 24:21
The lot to unpack it's, there's so much
Alison Cebulla 24:22
to unpack, yeah, but they did mention the risk of attributional bias. And so this might occur when a given condition is attributed to adverse childhood experiences exposure, yet, in the condition may not be a function of adverse childhood experiences. And again, there's a lot of nuance there, but it's important understand that attributional bias exists, and you may be you know, it makes me think of like, false past memories. Remember when that was like a whole thing of like, we're like, remember This repressed memory and then it turned out like it wasn't real. So these are this, this, where we, when it comes to psychosocial interventions, there's just so many different ways that the brain works that are just wild. And so it can be, it can be a tough type of intervention to put into place. So if you're telling people this may be because of trauma, it could be kind of equivalent to almost like planting a false memory. So another potential risk of harm is that you might be labeling someone as at risk as a result of the screening, which is stigmatizing and may have negative mental health outcomes as a result of being labeled at risk for individuals. And then another really huge piece is that resources are limited when it comes to what we can put into place for health interventions. And so when you're allocating money in one area, typically it means you probably don't get to put it in another area. So do we know that this is the very best intervention to use with the money and resources that are available. And so it's really important that all of this be considered. Given that you could actually allocate the resources in another way that could be more effective. So again, that honestly barely scratched the surface of this thing. And we will put up, Wilson will put the links to all of these in a blog that will link here so that you can find them all. But that one is just just so important. Not to mention, I mean, I probably just didn't didn't note that, but also just certain groups being more targeted than others, such as by race. So there's just there's so many things to think about when it comes to screening. So another study published in the Journal of addictive behaviors in their may 2024. Issue. This was a meta analysis of tobacco use behavior among adults exposed to cumulative adverse childhood experiences. So a meta analysis is when they look at all the studies, because each study has its own limitations and biases. So when you find a meta analysis, this is really great, because researchers are looking at what is everyone agreeing on pretty much? Or what is the consensus based on all of these studies? Like what can we all agree on. And so this is really what you want to look for. Especially if you're making a trauma informed program or policy at your organization or your agency, you're going to want to reference these meta analyses and systematic reviews, more than just one off studies. So they looked at 42 studies, which is kind of amazing, with a totaling up a population of over 600,000 participants in cohort and cross sectional study design. And so they, I feel that this one is very intuitive, but it's still always nice to just know that someone review the literature and they, it is still the case, that adverse childhood experiences leads to XY and Z health outcomes. So we can imagine that if you have a lot of stress in childhood that you may be inclined to be a smoker in adulthood or in your teenage years. So this is the consensus, four or more adverse childhood experiences. If you these, the population they looked at had that exposure of four or more, this increase the odds of current tobacco use initiation, former use nicotine dependence, and the use of E cigarettes. And so people with four or more ACEs and there's there's 10. So people with far more were twice as likely to have ever used tobacco, and nearly four times as likely to be current tobacco users than those without aces.
Bri Twombly 29:17
So interesting, and I just, it's so hard to not dive really deep into the first study, like we could just
Alison Cebulla 29:25
the first study, we're just gonna have to do. Yeah, we just Yeah.
Bri Twombly 29:30
And there's some other studies out there that are like aligned with that. So yeah, we will have to put together a webinar to go into
Alison Cebulla 29:37
that a little. Yeah, I know Daniela will want to be in on that one too. Yeah. Yeah.
Bri Twombly 29:44
So I am going to kind of wrap up our peer reviewed section now with a few different studies that I found and wanted to kind of bring in highlight today. So the first is from the January 2024 issue of adversity and resilient science. And the authors of this study, we're looking at positive childhood experiences and recognizing that there isn't necessarily one tool that exists to measure positive childhood experiences. It's a newer area of research, a really important area of research. And we don't really necessarily have consensus related to tools. What should we kind of be using if we're trying to measure that. So they've reviewed different research studies that existed, that were talking about how they measure positive childhood experiences. And their findings show that there were numerous measures that existed, some measures are validated, some measures were not validated, they were maybe modified, based on research, or other kinds of models or frameworks that were out there. And they really recommended based on the findings of this, that in order to really help us to kind of interpret the results and understand them, kind of to Allison's point of, kind of when we can take all kinds of studies and look at them and have that large, what are those consistent things, if we're wanting to do that we need some consistent tools to to be able to take a look at that, as well as to make policy recommendations. So when we're making policy recommendations, when we have those larger numbers, again, when we have that consistency, that's more impactful. So they've really recommended moving toward a consistent tool to measure positive childhood experiences. They didn't endorse any specific tool within that. So I'm interested to kind of continue to see where this goes, if there's any movement, based on this research study, if we do start to see some consistency, in what that can look like, because I think there's there's some pros and cons to having a standardized tool that looks at things, we're thinking about positive experiences, as well as adverse childhood experiences.
Alison Cebulla 32:02
And it's just always so nice to know that we're focused on positive childhood experiences. I'm really moving forward with that, like, what can we what can we put in, you know, to take care of kids? It's just so good.
Bri Twombly 32:15
Yeah. And I think because it's it's newer research, but the scientists in research behind it is so amazing. Like, it helps to like buffer against the impact of adverse childhood experiences. So in my mind, like, yes, it's still important to talk about trauma to like, know what that is. But when we're really talking with families, and when we're in communities, when we're talking with one another, like, those positive things like how do we create and foster and strengthen those are the things that I really am hoping we can continue to kind of move the conversation more in that direction.
Alison Cebulla 32:53
There's so there have been so many studies. There's like a center for compassion, compassion research at Stanford, but so, so much about like the power of gratitude. And I think when we can really focus on and call upon, like, the things that will really worked well for us it. That's just so good for our mental health. Yeah,
Bri Twombly 33:14
absolutely. And the next study that I'm talking about is also positive childhood experiences, like related, and it's talking about the impact that it can have for kind of mental health conditions and diagnoses. So a perfect segue into that. So thanks for that, Allison. Yeah. So this study is from January of 2024. And it was published in the International Journal of child abuse and neglect. And it was a study in British Columbia, there were 8864 adolescents, ages 16 to 17 that participated in the study. And each participant was asked to provide an a score from zero to four, so they didn't have to endorse any aces. And they didn't have to say if their score was higher than four, because all of the research related to ACES is, if it's four or higher, it doesn't matter. There's the same kind of dose response relationship that's shown so they didn't need to endorse anything higher than four. They also were asked to complete the Child and Youth resilience measure, which is one of those tools that is used to measure positive childhood experiences. And then they were also asked to complete validated skills for depression, anxiety and overall mental well being. The study found that adolescents with zero aces zero reported aces had significantly better mental health and well being than those with one or more ace. So that's a lot of what we've already seen, kind of from the originally study and like over the years, related to isas, they also found that having six or more positive childhood experiences was associated with better mental health and well being and adolescents with and without aces. So again, there's that power of having those positive childhood experiences and the more a person has, the better is for their overall functioning and mental health. So the study really helped to show that positive childhood experiences can protect against depression among adolescents with aces, as well as to kind of help promote mental health and well being among all adolescents who participated in the study. And a piece that I forgot to mention at the beginning is this was really looking at kind of the impact of the pandemic, like specific to adolescents, so those who have been adolescents during kind of the height of the pandemic. And these findings really helped to emphasize the importance of addressing social determinants of mental health in order to help to mitigate and buffer against the impact of aces. And as we were just kind of talking about, really thinking about how are we promoting positive childhood experiences as part of a public health approach to mental health, especially for our children, but also thinking about for adults as well, because we can use them too. There was a special collection of trauma informed health care that was just released by the permanent day journal. And there are lots and lots of different articles in there that are really interesting and worth kind of taking a look at. But I really wanted to highlight one that I found really interesting. This study was originally published within the permanente journal in October of 2023. And this study looked at healthcare trainees and how they were discussing aces and health with adult patients, specifically looking at the use of metaphor to talk about ACEs and the impact on health, which I found interesting because I have talked about ACEs and the impact that stress and trauma can have on our brain with metaphors for years. So I was like, oh, there's research on like, if this is helpful, or not. So I was excited, kind of from that lens to take a look at it, too. And what they did is they use videotape sessions, from the trainees, and they discovered that there were 24 different metaphors that were used by the trainees, when they were talking with patients, it found that the metaphors may be really efficient and effective tools for discussing aces, as they can help to improve kind of clinician communication, as well as patient understanding. They didn't find that there was any one metaphor that was kind of better than any of the others. With that, and they also talked about how it can really be helpful, because sometimes we have like, here's the one way to talk about it, or here's the one thing, and that isn't the most accessible or doesn't necessarily click for everyone. And so this was talking about how it allowed the trainees to use different metaphors, depending on the family, depending on what the family's needs were. And that helped them to be able to communicate more effectively, rather than kind of requiring a specific metaphor to talk about that. So I really liked that it wasn't emphasizing there's one right way to do it, like we can do sometimes. With that. And then the last study that I wanted to bring up today, that's kind of the end of our kind of news, and peer reviewed research is that in the news this week, they're kind of fed the results of a study out of the University of Georgia, where there are 504 Black men from rural Georgia who participated and some surveys to see if there was an association between experiencing early adversity, specifically exposure to racism, and reports of suicidal ideation as an adult. The study also was really curious to see if there were changes in thinking that occurred for these men as a result of experiencing trauma, and if that was what was contributing to their suicidal ideation. So the study found that one in three black men living in rural America reported experiencing suicidal thoughts. And researchers really found that people who grew up in under resourced and who faced racial discrimination as children and into young adulthood, were more likely to feel Miss truster isolation and social relationships leading to suicidal thoughts. So there were kind of two main takeaways that I got from kind of reading on this study. When I think about why this matters. To me why this matters, when we're thinking about kind of systemic change and creating more healing communities is that it really showed again, how experiencing systemic trauma One example of really racism from a young age can have lasting impacts on people's thoughts and behaviors. Sometimes we really think about trauma as like an individual experience, something that may have happened. And there's a lot of systemic trauma that's out there. And it's important for us to be talking about that for thinking about it, for considering how our organizations may be contributing to systemic trauma, as well, and how we want to be having those conversations with families as well. And also thinking about having conversations with families about how trauma has the potential to change how we're thinking about things. So we can make it so maybe our thoughts are not as positive that we're not having a hopeful view of ourselves of others of the world? And how are we talking about that, and considering that when we are kind of partnering with individuals and families. The other thing that it really highlighted for me, was the need for interventions that again, promote those positive childhood experiences. So when we're thinking about having positive, healthy relationships, when we have safe and equitable environments, when people have connections with the community, that helps to really strengthen a sense of belonging, it helps to increase self worth and self esteem. Again, it buffers against some of those impacts, if there is that kind of adverse experiences that they're having as childhood that can change how we are wiring our brain. So maybe instead of developing those more kind of unhelpful, negative thoughts, we continue to feel like no, like, maybe a bad scary thing happened to me, but I am still worthy. The world isn't necessarily a bad place. It's not like a scary place. Because trauma can really make us believe otherwise. So yeah. Again, the power of positive childhood experiences.
Alison Cebulla 42:00
Yes, that is a good theme. Well, thanks for summarizing all those such good stuff to dive into. I'm like, I want to talk, deep dive on these. We're gonna do some webinars. Yeah. So one thing that we offer at 10 Collective is literature reviews to support grant applications, and grant writing, based on the best evidence in these fields. So if your organization needs some help compiling a literature review, so that you can design an intervention, apply for funding, evaluate an intervention, we can help with that. So you know, we review the research every week. And we've been doing this for a long time. So we can make a really great case as to why you may want funding for such a program or as to why you want might want to build a program a certain way. So please reach out to us. Our website is 10 Dash collective.com. You can also reach out to us here on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for tuning in to our very first healing horizons news segment. And we are so grateful that you were here to watch with us and we will see you next week.
Bri Twombly 43:28
Thanks for joining everyone.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
