If American children are suffering
the same kind of post-traumatic stress disorder
that we see in soldiers of war, what does that
mean for our communities?
And what can we do to help these children?
Thank you for joining us in this discussion.
I'm Laura Frank, President of News at Rocky Mountain PBS.
We've just watched the documentary "Wounded Places."
it's part of the PBS series called "Raising of America."
And now some Colorado experts on childhood trauma
will join us for discussions about what
the evolving research means and what Colorado is
doing to protect its children.
First, let's turn to Dr. Desmond Runyan, the Jack
and Viki Thompson Professor of Pediatrics
at the University of Colorado, and the Executive Director
of the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment
of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Dr. Runyan, you've been researching childhood abuse
for more than 30 years.
Have you seen the kind of PTSD that we
saw in this documentary?
Have you seen that in our communities here?
We see that all the time.
Children are referred to our center
or to Children's Hospital for evaluation
for abuse and neglect.
And children who are withdrawn, who have excessive fear, who
are hyper vigilant, those are the kinds
of kids that we see in our clinic.
What are the kinds of things that are sending them there?
What is causing the PTSD?
Depends the age of the children.
Young children are affected by physical abuse
and sexual abuse.
But actually, one of the biggest causes of some of the traumas
they have is witnessing domestic violence.
Young children aged four and six appear
to be more seriously damaged by witnessing domestic violence
than themselves being a victim of physical abuse
from a psychological standpoint.
That's amazing.
So it's actually not the child experiencing
the physical abuse, or the mental,
or what have you himself or herself.
It's actually witnessing someone else.
Why is that?
Why does the brain--
Children who are very young have relatively little sense
of what's going on in terms of what's OK and not OK
because they don't have comparison.
So they don't know that they're being spanked more harshly,
or that being put in a corner or being
made to go outside in the cold snow
are not something that's common.
But the person that they look to for security and food
and safety and nurture and love is that mother.
And if the mother is terrified and screaming and being
beaten up, the message for that child is there's no safe place.
This world is a dangerous place and everybody is a victim.
You have called for a game-changing paradigm shift.
Tell us what you mean by that.
So one of the things that we've been concerned about
is that getting reported to Social Services
is a little bit like getting a speeding ticket.
If you're in the right neighborhood
where there's a camera or a cop, you'll get caught.
But you could do the same thing in someplace else
and you could speed even faster and not get caught.
To some extent, child maltreatment is like that.
If you live in an environment where
there are lots of other people around,
if you live in an apartment building
and they hear their child screaming, if the child's going
to school and bruises are noted, or if a child's seriously
injured and goes to a children's hospital or a general hospital
and gets spotted, they'll get reported.
But there's nobody reporting the child who
is beaten who doesn't go to school the next day
and nobody sees the bruises.
Nobody is reporting the kid who was choked or threatened
or knocked down.
What are the first steps for moving
into that kind of paradigm shift?
Well, so part of it is that we need
to think about the well-being of children.
Colorado is one of five states that
has a grant from the Centers for Disease Control to actually
look at the environment and how to improve
the environment for children.
It's called Essentials for Childhood.
And the goal here is to try and use
what's called collective impact, to try and get people
thinking in all kinds of different ways
about how to improve the lives of children.
And it can go from negotiating with businesses in town
to thinking about family friendly business
practices that allow parents to be there for their kids,
parental leave policies that make it so parents don't feel
like they're torn between putting food on the table
and giving love to their kids.
We have now, in Colorado, had a child abuse hotline for a year.
And I think in 2015 there were more than slightly
more than 200,000 calls to that hotline.
Most of them were calls from teachers and law enforcement,
the people you might expect, and who
are required by law to report suspicion of child abuse.
There's been some talk about wanting to expand that
to people who are just everyday people, maybe
not like you, but more like me, who see something, suspect
something.
What should people be on the lookout for?
And is it important to make sure that we're all
vigilant about the condition of children in our community?
Exactly.
It's really important that we all
be thinking about children's well-being.
And a lot of people think, well, that's another family
I'm not going to get involved that I
want to stick my neck out.
I might be wrong.
Reporting suspected child abuse, it's suspected,
it's not proven.
You don't have to prove it.
Social Services and Children's Hospital, our medical team
will get involved in helping to sort those out.
But those are often-- if you're worried about it,
it's a family that needs help.
And trying to call them some help is what you're doing.
And so it's not like it's a punishment.
It's like it's a benefit to call folks.
So we should give that number.
It's 844-CO-4-KIDS, easy to remember.
844 Colorado for Kids.
CO-4-KIDS.
that's 844-264-5437.
Dr. Runyan, thank you for sharing your expertise with us.
Glad to be here.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
With us now is Dr. Lydia Prado, who is Vice President of Child
and Family Services at the Mental Health Center of Denver.
Welcome to Rocky Mountain PBS, Dr. Prado.
Thank you for having me.
You're very welcome.
So the Mental Health Center of Denver
just opened a new campus.
What is the name of it?
It's the Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-Being
And that's in Northeast Denver.
Northeast Park Hill.
Oh, excellent.
One of the residents there, a longtime
and well known resident, Anna Jo Haynes,
said at the time of the groundbreaking,
she asked the question, how are the children?
And I'd like to start there.
Both in northeast Denver and the rest of the state,
how are the children in Colorado?
Anna Jo was referring to an African proverbial story
where that's how you would assess the health
and well-being of a community, is
by asking how the children are as an indicator, again,
of overall health and well-being.
And I think the children are resilient,
the children are strong, the children
are bright and intelligent and have a lot of potential.
However, there are a number of children in Northeast Park
Hill in the state of Colorado that
are living under some very trying circumstances,
and they're stressful.
I asked Dr. Runyan this earlier when he was with us.
I would like to ask you, too, have you seen in your work
the kind of PTSD that we saw in the documentary,
in "Wounded Places"?
Have you seen that here in our communities?
Oh yes, definitely.
We do.
We treat that.
I see that every day in the children and families
that walk through our doors.
Again, we have a number of folks who, perhaps-- people talk
about poverty and the impact of poverty, so who
are living with crowded conditions,
who are worrying about where their next meal comes from,
who are not able to find what they need when they need it,
who are worried about the education of their children,
who are worried about not having safe places to move around.
And really, some of the things that I'm
sure we take for granted are not-- they
can't count on safety and quiet and calm
and resources being available to them.
So not only with the children, but with the adults as well.
And it's working together.
Absolutely.
Because we see-- I mean, what impacts a mom or a dad
impacts their little one.
And so we have to be thinking about supporting and being
comfortable and sustaining health in a family,
because it really is about a relationship
between a little one and his or her caregiver
that, for me, provides the protection,
the protection that would help mitigate
the impacts of living under these stressful conditions.
We saw in this film a lot about research that is going on now.
And I know this is an area that the center keeps up
with very carefully.
What do you see are some of the most promising areas
of research right now?
What are we learning?
We're learning a lot about brain development,
a lot about when it starts, a lot about plasticity
of the brain, but a lot about how toxic
stress impacts development, and how early that happens.
So for instance, we know that there
are 700 neural connections that are made every second
in that first year of life.
So if there is stress that's impacting that,
it has a direct impact on the brain structure
and architecture, so that those impacts last a lifetime.
And so the earlier that we can support and provide
children and families what they need to have that not happen,
the better off we're going to be.
And now we're learning that that happens in utero,
that mom's stress while she's pregnant
impacts a developing child.
So all of that, to me, I think, speaks
to where we need to intervene, where we need to put our money,
where we need to pay attention, and where
we need to make a difference.
On the money front, we hear people
talk about-- and including in this film-- a lot
about the spending on education versus spending
on incarceration.
And here in Colorado, there's definitely a difference.
I think we spend three times more
on incarceration than we do on education, $30,000 versus less
than $10,000.
But it's true in every state in the nation,
that we spend more per inmate than we do per student.
Why do people make this comparison of incarceration
versus education?
What is the impact of that?
Well, I think many times people make the comparison
so that we understand that we're spending a lot more money where
we shouldn't be, in a sense, that when I think about it,
how does a community benefit from having
this large group and all of these expenses
in incarceration, wherein we could all benefit
from supporting and sustaining and educating
bright, young, talented, exceptional creative people who
would then be participants fully in a thriving community.
And given what the research is showing now,
if we were able to intervene earlier, then
it could be an either/or choice.
We may not have to deal with impacts that might lead someone
toward a life of incarceration.
We could actually spend the money on education instead.
Right.
We could actually launch people really well and get-- yes.
Rocky Mountain PBS News did an investigation a little
over a year ago about untreated mental health
problems in Colorado and found that the cost
of untreated mental health actually
costs each and every Coloradoan about $1,000 a year.
That's things like lost wages or preventable medical care,
or time incarcerated.
All of that spending dwarfs what is spent, actually,
on direct care.
Why is this such an uphill battle?
Why are we having these either/or conversations?
Why is it so difficult to address?
I think there's a lot of history and misunderstanding
about mental illness.
And it's like, we don't have this conversation about heart
disease.
We don't have this conversation about brain disease.
And yet mental illness is a brain dysfunction.
And we have never thought of that
of mental illness in the same way
as we think of physical illness.
And I think part of that conversation
is really taking mental illness and understanding
that as a physical illness, or a disability of some type.
You might have diabetes, which limits you in this way.
You might have this-- it's been stigmatized
very differently than we have with some
of our primary physical concerns.
So there is a lot of stigma around talking
about mental illness.
And I think we need to switch the conversation to supporting
mental health and well-being because that seems
to be where people want to go.
It's the same conversation, but just a different perspective
and a different way of addressing the issue.
But nobody wants-- who wants to be associated
with mental illness when it has all
of this baggage along with it?
And yet one out of every four adult Coloradoans, and one
out of every five teens will face some sort,
or experience some sort of mental illness
within any given year.
So there are very few of us who are not affected
either directly or indirectly.
What can we do to help?
What can the individual person do?
I think we need to have the conversation that you just
started.
We know that one in five, or one in four adults,
one in five young people-- and in order
to help those young people-- so again,
child and family-- we need to start
talking about what's going on with young people
and normalizing what's going on and young people,
because they also-- what's reported to me when
I talk to them is, they feel very isolated
and feel like they're the only person.
One in five, and they're feeling like they're
the only one that is struggling or isn't feeling well,
or is battling depression, or is having dark thoughts.
And we need to, again, let them know that that is not uncommon.
They are not alone.
We need to start having that conversation amongst ourselves
and feeling comfortable about that.
Dr. Prado, thank you for helping open this conversation.
You're quite welcome, Laura.
Thank you for having me.
You may join the conversation and learn more at our website,
rmpbs.org.