'Anything but ACE'
Editor:
I want to congratulate the Journal on two superb recent articles, "Reaching for Resilience" (Oct. 1) and "Erasure" (Oct. 29). Traumatic childhood experiences were the main subject in the first article and figured heavily in the second, and both articles were eye-openers for me. This is a very serious problem and deserves to be dealt with in a serious manner. But how can we do that with this terminology, with traumatic childhood experiences being called ACES? "Hey, that girl had an incarcerated parent, suffered very poor nutrition, and was sexually abused. So she holds three ACES." Gimme a break. This is one of the stupidest terms I have ever heard, and I've been around for a while.
The Journal got it right when it cited "the traumatic foundation" of health problems in their lead up to the first article. I suggest that the Journal, the ACLU, local tribes, Humboldt State University and anyone else dealing with this situation set their word processors on find and replace, and delete ACE in favor of TCE, Traumatic Childhood Experience, or perhaps TEE, Traumatic Early Experience, just T for short. Anything but ACE.
David Callow, Glendale
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