Main description:

This guide provides healthcare students and professionals with a foundational background on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - traumatic early life experiences, which can have a profound impact on health in later life.

ACEs can include being a victim of abuse, neglect or exposure to risk in the home or community. How healthcare students and professionals learn to recognize, react and respond to persons affected by trauma will lay the foundation for their relationships with patients. This book intentionally uses micro-to-macro lenses accompanied by a structural competency framework to elucidate health implications across the lifespan. It explores the nature of adversity and its effects on the physical, emotional, cognitive and social health of individuals, communities and society. The book, written by two experienced psychiatric nurses, will equip healthcare students and professionals with an understanding for critical change in practice and offer action steps designed to assist them with prevention and intervention approaches and steps to help build resilience.

This book will be core reading for healthcare students within mental health, pediatric and primary care nursing courses. It will also be of interest to students and professionals in the social work, psychology and public health fields who are exploring resilience and trauma-informed practices

Contents:

PART I

Knowledge development about ACEs

Introduction: Repression to Spoken Truth - Opening Up

Making the Connection: The ACE Study

Toxic Stress, Adversity, and Trauma
PART II

Understanding ACEs from a life course health development perspective

The Body Keeps Score: Epigenetics

Early Brain Development: Childhood Trauma and Adversity

Developmental Psychology: Implication of ACEs

Community and Social Structural Determinants: Implications of ACEs

PART III

Reducing ACEs

8 Socioecological Model: Individual and Family Influences

9 Socioecological Model: Context and Cultural Influences

PART IV

ACE INTERVENTION: A SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL APPROACH

10 Early Identification and Trauma-Informed Approaches

11 Community and Societal Trauma-Informed Interventions

PART V

CONCLUSION

12 Moving Forward