MILWAUKEE COUNTY

On eve of three-day conference: 'We have a goal to make Milwaukee the most trauma-informed city in the country.'

John Schmid

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Marquette University President Mike Lovell hosts a recent brainstorming session to tackle the epidemic of trauma that ravages the city of Milwaukee. His group, called Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee, or SWIM, hosts a major conference on trauma this week.

Fiserv Forum already has a couple of concerts under its belt, and before long, it begins its primary purpose, hosting the Milwaukee Bucks.

On Wednesday night, however, the new arena gets an unexpected use:

It hosts an ambitious conference on the topic of healing, with well over a thousand participants expected to hear how to address the epidemic of psychological trauma that increasingly is seen as the root cause for a host of social ills — unemployment, mental illness, aggression, addiction, homelessness, even suicide.

The event might feel at times like a revival — it will feature gospel choirs, a closing prayer and a video appearance by Milwaukee native Oprah Winfrey, who earlier this year broadcast a documentary on Milwaukee's trauma epidemic on the TV show "60 Minutes."

And in some respects, the speakers are doing a bit of evangelizing. Some of the nation's most prominent trauma researchers and clinicians will talk about the searing post-traumatic disorders inflicted on the human nervous system in the aftermath of violence, gunfire, domestic abuse, parental neglect, chronic anxiety and economic insecurity.

Wednesday night’s conference also kicks off two additional days with over two dozen more keynotes and workshops. Hosted in the nearby Wisconsin Center convention hall, speakers on Thursday and Friday will talk about therapeutic practices for traumatized and maltreated children, building resilience, school-centered mental health programs, implications for criminal justice as well as a talk on "helping children cope in an uncertain era.”

Wednesday night's event is free to anyone who preregisters at sainta.org; the following two days have an admission fee of $190.

The newly constructed Fiserv Forum hosts a conference Wednesday night on race and the city's epidemic of neurological trauma.

The event is billed as “Healing Trauma, Healthy Communities.” Few if any cities ever held such an ambitious three-day conference on the same scale on a topic that only recently has become part of the social and economic debate.

“Research shows an undeniable link between childhood adversity and community crises, such as poverty, crime, poor educational outcomes, chronic illness, behavioral health problems and more,” according to the conference website.

Trauma conferences are known to trigger emotional breakdowns among attendees whose suppressed trauma memories abruptly surface. On hand on all three days will be counselors and comfort rooms for emotionally stricken attendees, conference planners said.

In the works since January, the conference is the brainchild of a new consortium called Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee. SWIM, as it calls itself, includes social service workers, therapists, addiction counselors, university researchers, leaders of nonprofits, criminal justice authorities and health care representatives. The all-volunteer collective was founded by Marquette University President Mike Lovell and his wife, Amy, both active in mental health and trauma-responsive causes.

"We have a goal to make Milwaukee the most trauma-informed city in the country," Lovell said. "Obviously, we have a long way to go," but the conference is meant to catalyze new conversations and coalitions.

The conference puts at least as much emphasis on healing as it does on the toxic social and economic fallout caused by widespread neurological trauma. The social media hashtag is #HealMKE.

The healing at SWIM is not just about individuals, but the city itself, one of the nation's most impoverished and segregated. While trauma is universal to any geography, ethnicity or social class, Wednesday night's event zeroes in on "Race and Trauma."

Radio talk show host Jermaine Reed will moderate a panel on “race and trauma” at a major conference in Milwaukee on Wednesday night. He shows a pair of wrist shackles from Ghana once used on slave ships.

The topic "is my life's mission," said Jermaine Reed, a prominent radio talk show host on WNOV-AM (860) and owner of a trauma-responsive Milwaukee foster care agency.

For African-Americans, a new school of researchers argues that the neurological impact can be traced through multiple generations back to leg irons, whippings and slavery. "A Time to Heal," a series of stories last year in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, explored the same dynamic within Milwaukee, where trauma spreads from generation to generation, family to family, neighborhood to neighborhood. For her documentary, Winfrey interviewed the same subjects who appeared in the Journal Sentinel series.

On Wednesday night, one of the central topics will be “historical trauma” — the collective and cumulative traumatization of an oppressed group. One of history’s most extreme instances of historical trauma is American slavery. Historical trauma, in turn, can lead to generational trauma, which has been documented in the descendants of people who experienced the Nazi Holocaust, the bombing at Hiroshima, the purges in Cambodia, and Soviet Russia.

SERIES:A Time to Heal

The generational dynamic often is attributed to conditioned behaviors of parents who are rendered emotionally numb by their trauma, themselves mentally walled off from things they wish they could unsee, handicapping their capacity as parents. And just as often, there's a genetic predisposition to depression and anxiety that's passed to children when parents live with post-traumatic stress that's so chronic that it floods the parent's body with toxins, which mutate the genetically code.

That's become a science unto itself called epigenetics and is studied around the world.

"Epigenetics is the trauma in the blood," Reed said in an interview. "It's the memory of trauma that's in our DNA."

In the nation's race debate, such topics are overlooked, misunderstood or taboo, Reed said. In Reed's view, it's the part that white people often don't understand when they say "slavery happened a long time ago" — as if the legal institution of enslavement in the economic system of the colonies more than four centuries ago wasn't followed by everything from lynchings to Jim Crow laws to today's racial strife.

In an interview in his child welfare office, he shows a pair of shackles that were used in the African-American slave trade. He acquired them on a trip to Ghana. "PTSD," Reed said, "can be inherited. The idea is to break the vicious cycles."

The SaintA social service agency, which planned the SWIM trauma conference, argues that the idea of historical trauma is crucial to understanding both the root of the problems as well as the solutions.

"We have learned that you cannot talk about healing trauma without talking about race and trauma, and about historical trauma, institutional racism, slavery, implicit bias, and other difficult historical truths," said SaintA chief executive Ann Leinfelder Grove.

SaintA has been a pioneer in the city's trauma-response efforts. "If we can crack the conversation on race and trauma, that's an accelerant to change," Grove said. "We are trying to build bridges. Our community needs to be able to have these crucial conversations."

Milwaukee’s SaintA social agency led the planning for a major conference this week on trauma. "60 Minutes" correspondent Oprah Winfrey met with SaintA staff while filming a segment about childhood trauma, which aired in March. From left: SaintA marketing executive Michelle Sieg; Winfrey; former SaintA chief executive Teri Zywicki; current SaintA chief executive Ann Leinfelder Grove; and SaintA chief clinical officer Tim Grove.

Wednesday night's gathering in the new arena includes a talk by Bruce Perry, a internationally recognized psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher at the Child Trauma Academy in Houston. His talk is billed as an "Orientation to Trauma, Race, Recovery and Healing."

On the following day, L. Song Richardson, law school dean at the University of California-Irvine, will talk on “The Impact of Implicit Racial Bias on Communities.” One of Friday's workshops includes a talk on "Racism as Collective Epigenetic Trauma."

Rob Anda, the public health researcher who created the internationally standardized "adverse childhood experiences" questionnaire to screen for trauma exposure, will share his views on healing.

Asked what he hopes the three-day conference will achieve, Lovell noted that trauma is universal but trauma scores are densely concentrated and elevated in the urban core.

"We are very segregated," Lovell said. "There’s a lot of distrust. We have to work together and to do that we have to appreciate our differences and learn to trust each other.”