“An extraordinary, eye-opening book.” —People
National Health Information Awards winner
“A rousing wake-up call. . . . This highly engaging, provocative book prove[s] beyond a reasonable doubt that millions of lives depend on us finally coming to terms with the long-term consequences of childhood adversity and toxic stress.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego—a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault—who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.
The stunning news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime. For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the fascinating scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent vitally important hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come?.
“Nadine Burke Harris . . . offers a new set of tools, based in science, that can help each of us heal ourselves, our children, and our world.”—Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed
“A powerful—even indispensable—frame to both understand and respond more effectively to our most serious social ills.”—New York Times
The question I was left with at the end was this: wouldn't many of her struggling patients and their families have been helped more by higher wages and more affordable housing, which would have helped them out of the poverty that was at the root of many of their struggles? She states adamantly that she doesn't want the problem to be dismissed merely as an issue of poverty, and I understand her reasons--wealthy people can and do suffer such problems--but the unspoken truth is that many of her patients suffered round after round of health problems due almost solely to being unable to escape from their difficult surroundings because of poverty. Sadly, poverty has come to be viewed with contempt since the Reagan era but it is a fact that wealthy people have the money and resources to rescue themselves while the poor do not. No amount of cobbled-together, temporary programs for treatment can change that and COVID-19 has clearly shown us that our present society is perfectly willing to tolerate a staggering death rate rather than marshal the resources to address a complicated problem.