The TED talk that I chose is all about how childhood trauma affects someone emotionally and how it hinders the developing brain and body of children. Nadine Burke Harris has spent her working life researching adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how it impacts the developing body later in life. Harris is the Surgeon General of California meaning she is the main spokesperson for the state of California for public health matters, which further validates her credibility and knowledge on this topic. In this TED talk, Harris argues that it is necessary for people to look at as ACEs one of the most unaddressed public health threats to our society.

Harris is a mental health researcher, whose whole career is based off of ACEs and how she can help children who have experienced ACEs. She argues that a way that ACEs can be identified earlier is if all pediatricians ask their patients the ACE questions: do you have a parent with mental health issues?, are your parents divorced?, does one of your parents struggle with substance abuse? etc. The more they answer yes, the more points they get, which correlates to how much more at risk they are for health issues like heart disease, cancer, COPD, and more likely to try and take their own life. She says that finding these risks out earlier and seeing how at-risk a specific child is can be beneficial because it allows the child to get the help they need early, so hopefully they can try to heal some of their trauma before it manifests in other health problems.

Trauma affects a kid’s brain and how it develops throughout childhood. For example, trauma causes the nucleus accumbens to not develop properly, which in turn affects the reward system in your brain that is highly connected to substance abuse. That’s not the only brain function that childhood trauma can affect, it also causes someone’s fight or flight system to constantly be going off. This system is controlled by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis which is affected by trauma because it makes the system constantly on alert, meaning that the kid always has a fast heart rate, dilated pupils, and other symptoms of anxiety, which ultimately makes you way more likely to develop cancer or heart disease in the future.

Harris makes it clear that she believes these health effects that come later in life because of childhood trauma can be prevented, but only if these children are helped from a young age. They can go into things like therapy and other mental health resources, to start working through their trauma at a young age, so it doesn’t hurt them as much later on in life.