Understanding Root Causes and Creating Real Change
ACEs: The Office of Children's Mental Health embraces the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and recognizes the important role this information plays in understanding and addressing children's mental health.
Trauma-Informed Care: As Wisconsin's ACEs awareness increases, more people in and outside the helping professions are echoing the trauma-informed care proclamation, "It's not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you." As a result, many state agencies, organizations, and communities are becoming trauma-informed.
Resilience: One outgrowth of our nation's heightened awareness of the potential life-long impact of adversity has been the investment in understanding what enhances a child's chance of moving through hardship and tragedy without lasting psychological, biological, social and emotional impact. This area of research, called "resilience," will better equip communities, the child-serving workforce, students support service staff, and families, with new tools and approaches to ensuring that every child has a chance to grow up without the devastating consequences of ACEs.