Comment by Cushman

ACE 1, so I’m qualified to respond :)

An important thing for you and I to keep in mind is that we aren’t just talking about psychology.

ACEs cause (or exacerbate) depression, anxiety, and so on; they also cause (or exacerbate) cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and so on.

It’s obviously a lot of work to disentangle causation from secondary health impacts of mental illness, but to our shame there is more than enough data, and the work has been done. An appreciable fraction of the damage done by ACEs is physical and irreversible after adolescence.

I think this is important for us to remember because it’s easy for us to say, oh, they must need some extra support. And yeah, they do. But it’s too little, too late. They — the children — need us to stop the ACEs from happening.

Editing in a caveat I remembered elsewhere: of course the scores don’t cause these things, and of course the individual variance is huge. As a diagnostic criterion, ACE is useful as a screener and that’s about it. As a statistic, it’s revealed a pandemic.