Mental Health Expert: If We Knew, We'd Do It Differently

Arkansas AWARE (Advancing Wellness And Resiliency in Education) is a project to support districts in efforts to provide mental health awareness and trauma informed practices. 100 Families Initiative members in Pope and Yell counties were joined by Nicole Fairchild of AWARE at their monthly alliance meeting. This Initiative helps families move from crisis to career by partnering existing community resources through a collaborative case management system.

Nicole Fairchild is passionate about informing community members and particularly educators about the on-going effects of trauma. One of the most substantial studies we have to inform us of this topic is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research.

Fairchild polls the room of community members present to see who has heard about ACEs. About half of the room raised their hands, supporting Fairchild's claim that more people need to be aware of this research so we can understand the challenges some people in crisis are facing.

The ACEs quiz is a survey of 10 questions about childhood experiences. Studies prove that adversity early in life has long term effects and can even reduce your life expectancy by as many as twenty years.

"These things that happen to us when we are little," says Fairchild, "have a profound impact on us over the course of our life including in terms of our health outcomes."

With this in mind, Fairchild says we need to be thinking about what our school children might have experienced before their first day of kindergarten.

"If we knew, we might do something a little different."

Hope is not lost for those with a high ACEs score and there is always a chance for individuals to beat the statistics.

"Risk is not destiny," says Fairchild. Intervention is crucial to keep these negative behaviors from being passed from one generation to the next. She says there has to be a determination of "It stops with me," but someone needs to empower and inform. Fairchild believes that members of the 100 Families Initiative are helping families draw that line.

One of the biggest ways we can help is by shifting our mindset to an awareness of behaviors and how trauma might be affecting that behavior. Fairchild says that rather than writing people off when they annoy us, we should consider what might be causing that behavior.

There is a biological and neural difference between someone with adverse childhood experiences and someone without. If we want to see better outcomes for families, we need to recognize people's stories and address them with consideration and compassion.

Fairchild challenges community members to give "undeserved kindness" and to change the question we ask from What's wrong with them? to What happened to them?

"We're going to do our best work if we can stay curious if we can remember to ask ourselves, 'I don't know what's happened but something may have.' ...There are times where they might need a little bit of kindness that they don't deserve so that they can get through this next thing."