Virginia Statewide Conference - Sept 17, 2026

THE CRISIS

The word means two things on this page.

One of them may be yours.

A crisis of public health

Childhood trauma is the leading root cause of death in America. 1,401 people a day, recorded under other names.

What follows is the evidence.

A crisis of your own

What happened to you a long time ago can still be happening to you tonight. If that is where you are, the evidence can wait.

Get help now →

What follows describes what childhood trauma does to a person. The words are heavy. They are also true. Read as much or as little as you want, and stop whenever you need to.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING AT

Childhood trauma is pulling down humanity.

1,401

Americans die every day of what happened to them as children.

7 in 10
American adults were wounded as children
1.783 billion
years of American life lost every year
30x
the risk of attempting suicide
$14.1 trillion
the annual cost to everyone else

More years of life than cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents and COVID at its peak — combined, and then multiplied.

Every figure sourced. Every one of them undercounts.
THE FOUR DISINTEGRATIONS

It does not kill you all at once. It takes you apart.

Four directions at once. Most people only ever get treated for one of them.

PHYSICAL

The body keeps the score

The weight. The sleep. The blood pressure, the blood sugar, the exhaustion nothing touches.

MENTAL

The mind turns on itself

The decisions you cannot explain. The drinking. The anxiety with no cause you can name.

SOCIETAL

What breaks a person breaks a community

The marriage that failed. The job you lost. The neighborhood nobody wants to live in.

SPIRITUAL

The loss of meaning

The sense that none of it means anything. That you are alone in it. That it will not change.

GO DEEPER

However far you want to take this.

Every claim above has a page behind it. Start anywhere.