The Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences in Adult Mental Health/Substance Abuse problems

There are two interesting articles on NPR's website regarding Adverse Childhood Experiences and their potential impact on people's behaviors.

Here's a link to their feature story, "Can Family Secrets Make You Sick?"

This one administers the quiz (I have "Finding Your ACE Score" available to print out and administer over in the sidebar under "Education") and explains some of the potential problems that having many ACEs can correlate with: "Take the ACE Quiz and Learn What it Does and Doesn't Mean"

The What Shapes Health Report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is here, and also in the sidebar under "Education." Of course, I simply swiped it from the link in the NPR story, but I enjoy keeping everything together so it is easy to find in the future.

 I always remind people that, though there is nothing we can do to take always the pain of past adverse experiences, we can help compensate for them (both individually and as a society) by shoring up Protective Factors. That's where I see real hope for us all.