The 2026 Scars to STARs Summit shifted the conversation from what we know about childhood adversity to what we can do about it.
By Orli Santo
May 22 was Scars to STARs Day, the national holiday observed on the fourth Friday of May — Mental Health Awareness Month. Registered by the STAR Network Foundation, the day is dedicated to survivors of complex post-traumatic stress, adverse childhood experiences, and the long-term effects of toxic abusive relationships.
STAR Network, the Miami-based foundation that registered the holiday, marked it with a free, day-long virtual summit, the third in an annual series. This year’s edition, themed “ACE Studies: The Next 30 Years,” gathered roughly 1,600 registrants from across the United States and around the world. Thirty years after the original Adverse Childhood Experiences study gave the field its vocabulary, the clinicians and survivors leading the event established that the science is no longer the bottleneck to recovery. The bottleneck is the design of every American system the science was supposed to inform.
“Today is about what comes next,” Jamie Huysman, PsyD, LCSW, the STAR Network’s founder and executive director, told the audience at the open. “Not what was.”
The summit opened by honoring the field’s pioneers. A short film traced the evolution of the original ACE Study: from a Kaiser Permanente weight-loss clinic in San Diego, in which co-principal investigator Vincent J. Felitti, MD, FACP first began to see the correlation between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their outcomes in adults, to the ACE study’s present status as one of the most consequential pieces of public-health research in American history. Dr. Huysman recognized Felitti and his fellow co-PI Robert F. Anda, MD, MS, by granting them, in a pre-recorded filmed presentation, the 2026 STAR NeuroLeadership Award. “Most researchers never have their work get integrated into how people can heal and get better… It ends up in libraries and dusty journals,” Anda commented, reflecting on the unusual arc of the ACE study. “But this work, we didn’t know what we were getting into, and it just spread all around the world.”
Felitti and Anda’s study established an undisputed dose-dependent relationship between childhood adversity and adult risk for heart disease, cancer, addiction, mental illness, intimate partner violence, and premature death. The higher the score, the higher the risk.
Jennifer Hays-Grudo, PhD, and Amanda Sheffield Morris, PhD, co-directors of the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Adversity at Oklahoma State University, walked the audience through what thirty years of follow-on work added to the ACEs study. PACEs, or Protective and Compensatory Experiences, mirror the original ten-item ACE inventory, but in reverse. The PACEs study tracks five supportive relationships and enriching resources, each of which, when present, can blunt the body’s response to adversity across the lifespan. To illustrate the point, Morris told the story of a high-powered woman in one of the first PACEs measurement trials. “She announced to the group she had an ACE score of eight,” she recalled. “And then she said, ‘But I also have a PACE score of eight. And thank God that I took the PACEs measure, because I would think I was broken now if I hadn’t.’”
Mercie DiGangi, DO, is regional chair of the Child Abuse Prevention Program at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Her team has screened nearly half a million children across thirteen of the system’s medical centers over the past two years. The screening, now embedded in every well-child visit from age two to eighteen, operationalizes what the original ACE Study established into the clinical encounter itself. Her findings, in the rough: that ACE prevalence at Kaiser matches the national picture; that universal screening at this scale is feasible; and that the act of screening itself is the intervention. “The ACE score is really a magnifying glass,” DiGangi said. “You use it like a vital sign. Just like we check heart rate and blood pressure, we check the ACE score as well, because it impacts how we treat the patient.”
“The screening is a stepping stone to helping people heal themselves,” she added. “The question isn’t really what’s wrong with you. It’s what happened to you.”
Patrick J. Kennedy, co-founder of The Kennedy Forum and last year’s NeuroLeadership honoree, highlighted the importance of parity in mental health, for which he has been advocating over the past two decades. “We’re more connected technologically… the paradox is we’re more disconnected, human to human and story to story,” he said, in a pre-recorded conversation. “Organizations like the STAR Network, which connect people, which help people understand that there are interventions, there are solutions, and there is a new way… those things are vital to the country’s future. Because frankly, we’re in an existential crisis as a nation with the suffering.”
Tracking the implementation gaps over the past thirty years, Dr. Diana H. Fishbein, senior scientist at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, framed the bottleneck as “a systems problem, not a knowledge gap.” The flaws, in her diagnosis, are built into the architecture. American systems wait for crisis to respond, then pour resources into remediation with comparatively little going upstream. “It’s like waiting for a house to catch fire,” she said, “before we talk about smoke detectors.”
Bart Klika, PhD, chief research and strategy officer at Prevent Child Abuse America, took that diagnosis further.
“Trauma is not an individual failure or a bad parent problem. It’s a symptom of a system and a society that lacked accessible, affordable, supportive, and I would even say proactive services to help people before they find themselves in crisis,” he said. Imagine a community whose residents keep falling off a cliff at a popular vista, Klika explained: you could put ambulances at the bottom. That is tertiary prevention, treating people after harm. You could string a safety net partway down. That is secondary prevention, catching those at elevated risk. Or you could put fences at the top. That is primary prevention. The current American investment ratio, he argued, is inverted — heavy on tertiary, thin on primary. The result is a child welfare system being asked to do the work of paid family leave, affordable childcare, and accessible mental health care that the country has not built.
Klika illustrated the systemic failure with the story of a Chicago-based single mother, who was raising a child with developmental disabilities, while juggling a low-wage job without leave, and a four-hour round trip on public transit to a court-mandated therapy appointment with him. “Did my client really need child protective services,” Klika asked, “or did she need reliable, high-quality childcare so she was able to go to work?”
Where Fishbein and Klika converged was on the policy vehicle. Fishbein’s National Prevention Science Coalition is organizing a coalition campaign for a Congressional Decade of the Child, modeled on the 1990s Decade of the Brain that mobilized federal funding for neuroscience. The aim is a federal commitment to coordinated prevention research across health, education, child welfare, and justice. “We want to inject prevention into our water supply,” she said. Klika’s organization, Prevent Child Abuse America, has established clear links between state paid family leave, refundable earned income tax credits, and childcare subsidies and measurable reductions in child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and abusive head trauma.
The cost benefits of such policy changes were also made clear. Michael Menard, the 75-year-old retired engineer who founded United Against Childhood Trauma, brought the math. Applying a public-health tool called population attributable fraction to more than 350 peer-reviewed studies, his team has calculated that childhood trauma is the leading cause of death in the United States: more than 500,000 deaths a year, more than 1,400 Americans every day. “That’s more than four 737s falling out of the sky every morning,” Menard told the audience. “If four passenger jets fell out of the sky tomorrow, this country would ground every flight in America until we understood why.”
Menard arrived at this work through his two brothers, Patrick and Adam, who died of addiction. “What the world saw when my brothers died was not what I saw,” he said. “The world saw two grown men who died of substance abuse. I saw two wounded children who never got the help they needed.” His three-word program for the next half-century: “Name the wound. Heal the wound. Stop the wound.”
While the exact numbers Menard quoted are contestable — he noted that the population-attributable-fraction methodology compresses correlation with attribution in ways trauma researchers continue to argue about — the structural claim stands. The United States loses more life-years to unaddressed childhood adversity than to any single disease.
Richard Grannon, the STAR Network’s International Ambassador and one of the survivor community’s most-followed voices on narcissistic abuse, came to the summit with the specific brief other speakers avoided: how coercive-control relationships hold people in place, and how to leave them. “Boundarylessness has become its own form of imprisonment,” he said. The trauma identity itself, he argued, has to be actively shed. “I just got sick of carrying this identity,” he said from a whiteboard in his garden. “It was tiresome and sickening, and I was sick of it, and it was making me sick. Just shed this old skin.” His proposed framework is called TOV: trajectory, orientation, vector. It moves the survivor from the victim vector toward a chosen direction. The new story cannot be sustained alone, he added: It needs a tribe to reflect it back.
Jen Libby, MSW, LCSW, founded Promly — a social platform for teens that combines peer connection with mental-health tools — after her son Patrick died unexpectedly. The kids she had been treating as a clinical social worker had been telling her something for years: “Adults created social media. They’re literally watching it kill kids.” She set out to build the alternative in collaboration with the users it was for.
She brought two Tulane interns, Shelby Edwards and Ryan Foreman, to the panel. “The people who are older than us are noticing that we’re the anxious generation,” Foreman said. “But we feel that too. It starts with us, and we don’t like being the anxious generation. And we understand that phones can be bad for us.” “Gen Z’s been talking trauma-informed for a very, very long time,” Libby added. “They’re ready to take the reins and push to a true recovery and leadership space.”
The closing Wholehearted Global Forum film, curated by AJ Fox of Whole Hearted Studios, featured Joan Borysenko and Gabor Maté, framing trauma as an internal architecture and recovery as a relational one. Both sat naturally alongside the survivor-led arguments that had threaded through the day.
Omer Golan, founder of MyWhatIf, was twenty when a suicide bombing nearly killed him. “I didn’t move on from trauma,” he told the audience. “I relearned hope is a practice. I just worked every day.” Purpose was what brought him back — creating, volunteering, building things that gave meaning to his pain. The shift came when he stopped asking how to return to who he had been. “I stopped asking, ‘How do I go back to who I was before that bombing?’ And started asking, ‘Who can I become now?’ That question changed everything.”
The day closed with a moment of silence, called The Empty Chair for the Children We Lost, and the Children We Can Still Protect. Then came the ACEs Next 30 Declaration, a cross-sector commitment to the next generation of prevention, recovery, and resilience, with attendees invited to affirm in real time. Two announcements followed: the merger of PACEs Connection with STAR Network, and the STAR Network Global Trauma Consortium, whose first convening is set for October 10, 2026, World Mental Health Day.
“If we don’t break the family trauma,” Huysman said, “the family trauma will break us.”
Scars to STARs’ key claim was that policy can be made to reflect what science already knows. It remains to be seen if the next thirty years will deliver on that potential. But the fact of the summit itself — 1,600 participants, dozens of clinicians, numerous policy makers, seven hours — is proof that the work is progressing.
