Hi, I’m Matt Bennett. I am honored to be sitting here in Pasadena, California for up my THIRD, year working with Young and They’re the trauma of – an informed Initiative. I was introduced to the concept of trauma-informed around 2003 when IHealthyaround care back saw the Adverse Childhood Experience Study that Kaiser Permanente did in San Diego, California. And That WAS SO by important for me in up my work because I was working a lot with children at the timethat we at the time Were calling Them AT – risk youth who were having trouble with the criminal justice system and regular school systems.
And we really did not in psychology, as I was being trained as a therapist, have an understanding about why they got locked into these traps these cycles of behaviors, and always seemed to struggle. And once recording the Adverse Childhood Experience Study CAME out, it really started to show us the connection between childhood A the trauma of, and to Both brain development, and success in education, later on in employment, and things like housing.
We know kids with Adverse childhood A experiences are 2. 5 times more likely to fail a grade. But we see things like five times more likely to struggle with addiction, homelessness, criminal justice, abuse. So it started to put all these not only individual problems but also a lot of the social problems that we’ve seen. So the great thing about this movement, the ACE Study and Kaiser started, was it started to open up all these doors in the helping professions and public health to say how can we do things differently to get better health outcomes and social outcomes for the people that we serve?
Yeah, we want to help someone without a house get a home. We want to help someone with a disease get the medication they need to treat the disease. But a lot of times if we don’t ask what happened to this person and look for the underlying problem, it’s like a game of whack – a – mole. So we might treat the disease, but another social problem comes up. Or we might address the social problem, and then a psychological diagnosis comes up.
And so the challenge of the ACE Study and trauma-informed is that how do we not only help the person with some of the symptoms they come in for but also address the underlying problem. And so what I love about what Kaiser’s doing, what Young and Healthy’s doing here in Pasadenais getting the word out, giving capacityfor people like the Young and Healthy to not only sayokay, how can we become trauma-informedas a health organization,but how can we help our community, our policy makers, our school district become trauma-informed as well. Thank you for your time, and all your work.