Today, May 10, 2018, is National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day. Each year on this day there is opportunity to focus on and to raise awareness about the importance of children’s mental health and show that positive mental health is essential to a child’s healthy development.
Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect, and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.
See more about ACEs Science HERE
