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Overcoming child trauma.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

Even though Hannah Caron needed no proof that a traumatic childhood leads to serious health problems later in life, she got it anyway while studying psychology a few years ago at the University of Oregon.

That's when the Adverse Childhood Experiences study came out, documenting the strong link between childhood emotional trauma and heart disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, suicide, alcoholism and intravenous drug abuse decades later.

As the only child of a mentally ill woman, Caron bounced in and out of foster care, lived on the streets and experienced trauma firsthand for most of her life. "It was bizarre to me that people need that hard evidence," Caron says. "That was my life. It was obvious to me."

While working on a psychology research project in 2003, Caron met Elaine Walters, a Eugene social worker who was thinking about the ACE study and the obvious next step: finding what works to reduce or eliminate the physical and mental health consequences for adults who had suffered childhood trauma....