A headline earlier this year said it simply: Social Media is Devastating Teen’s Mental Health.Donna Jackson Nakazawa, an award-winning science journalist and the author of seven books exploring the intersection of neuroscience, immunology, and human emotion, is featured in this week’s encore episode of History Culture. Trauma.Jackson Nakazawa explains the crisis facing today’s girls as being a biologically -rooted phenomenon, and more, and offers solutions to the crisis that has many parents wondering what they can do.“The earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked bloom of social media and cultural misogyny. When this toxic clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development,” explains Nakazawa.This week’s episode of History. Culture. Trauma. is an excerpt from a recorded interview of Jackson Nakazawa conducted by PACEs Connection team members Carey Sipp and Natalie Audage in October, 2022, as a part of the PACEs Connection Connecting Communities One Book at a Time initiative. The initiative featured Jackson Nakazawa’s latest book, Girls on the Brink:Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media. The book was published last October.In the interview, Jackson Nakazawa focuses on the impact of modern society on adolescent girls. “Anyone caring for girls today knows that our daughters, students, and girls next door are more anxious and more prone to depression and self-harming than ever before. The question that no one has yet been able to credibly answer is “Why?”Jackson Nakazawa was clear that while she sees much to worry about girls’ mental health today, she also has hope. She offers 15 antidotes or “strategies for raising emotionally healthy girls” in the book and spoke about a several of them during the webinar from which this interview is gleaned. (See below for resources, including a link to the longer webinar interview in which she details the strategies.)Antidotes fall into three categories and include three on “the building blocks of good parent-child connection, and the importance of family connection,” six antidotes for “making her home a safe space,” and six antidotes to “bring in what the wider community can provide.” The longer webinar interview honed in on at least one antidote from each of the three categories, including making it a good experience when your daughter turns to you, the importance of “wonder”, and encouraging a sense of mastery.Jackson Nakazawa has appeared on The Today Show and NPR, and is a regular speaker at universities, including the Harvard Division of Science Library Series, Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins, Learning and the Brain, and the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. She is also the creator and founder of the narrative writing-to-heal program, which uses a process called Neural Re-Narrating to help participants recognize and override their brain’s old thought patterns and internalized stories.
Listen to “History. Culture. Trauma.” here online on Thursday, or access this, or prior podcasts, at the podcast service of your choice listed below.
(Note: This brief obituary was lovingly crafted with the support of Cherie Porter, Jane Ellen Stevens’ closest long-term friend; Dana Brown, one of the first employees of what became PACEs Connection; and Lori Dorfman, DrPH, MPH, director of the Berkey Media Studies Group, Jane’s friend with whom she taught and worked.)
Jane Ellen Stevens, beloved friend, award winning science journalist, and founder and publisher of ACEsTooHigh.com and PACEsConnection.com, died gratefully at her home in Northern California on Sunday, November 30th, in the company of her four cats and friend of 45 years, Cherie Porter.
Jane lived an active engaged life for seven years after her initial diagnosis of glioblastoma in 2018, followed by surgery, chemo, and radiation. In February of this year a second tumor foretold the inevitable, ultimately leading Jane to choose a “self-administered assisted death”, an end of life option in California.
Friends and colleagues were informed within the hour through the following message from Cherie:
The vivacious, wholly unique, and luminous star we have known as Jane, was extinguished at 12:00 p.m. on this day. She felt your love deeply, reflected love back, and was completely at peace.
Jane was born August 23, 1948 in New Jersey. Her career as a science journalist spanned nearly five decades and touched millions of lives world-wide through articles and stories in newspapers, magazines, videos and podcasts. Among others, she wrote for the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, the magazines Science, Nature, National Geographic, Technology Review, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. She pioneered video journalism for New York Times TV and founded a health/science/technology feature service with more than 20 client news organizations worldwide.
As a multimedia journalist, Jane reported for Discovery Channel. At UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, she helped found the multimedia reporting track, did groundbreaking work reporting on the prevalence and impact of domestic violence, and taught master classes for journalists on the importance of including in stories how exposure to trauma affects the epidemiology of violence.
Struck by the significance of findings in the 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study published by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control, Jane started writing about the study in 2005, with a post in the Sacramento Bee, “Targeting obesity at its roots: Childhood trauma may be at the core of the epidemic of overweight adults”. (As Jane was not a staff journalist at the Sacramento Bee, that post is not available in the publication’s online library.)
In 2009, Jane founded ACEsTooHigh.com, a news site for journalists and the general public. On this site she ultimately reposted the 2005 story which featured Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-principal author of the 1998 ACE Study, under the headline, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study — the largest, most important public health study you never heard of — began in an obesity clinic.” This article was among many of Jane’s ACEs Connection and then PACEs Connection posts that “went viral”, was picked up by news services, and generated hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of page views, helping increase awareness of ACEs Science. It also launched a two-decade, mutually respectful friendship between Jane and Dr. Felitti, the beginning of what would become the ACEs Science movement.
In 2012 Jane launched ACEs Connection.com, a social network comprising ACEsTooHigh.com and the ACEs Connection community of practice. ACEs Connection grew it from 200 members to some 60,000 members before Jane stepped down as its CEO in 2023.
Today, the site has more than 62,000 members worldwide, some 400 geographic sub-communities, and more than 40 topic-focused communities. There are 17 international communities represented on the site, with new members joining daily. Jane had launched ACEs Connection in part with an invitation email sent to 200 addresses from Dr. Felitti’s contact list.
Early on, Jane wrote of the work to make information about ACEs science more widely known:
The intent was to inform people, organizations, and communities about a new understanding of human behavior that had been emerging since the 1980s. It was clear that this new knowledge had the potential to solve our most intractable problems. The network was designed to connect the pioneers who were integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science across sectors. This included pediatricians, educators, business owners, judges, community activists, people participating in associations, people working in juvenile justice, social workers, people in the faith-based community, emergency medical technicians.
Remarkably, even after her diagnosis of glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, in February of 2018, Jane continued to live life to the fullest. She remained committed to caring for her friendships and her cats, experiencing the gifts of nature, exercising body and mind, and writing.
In October 2018, eight months after recovering from brain surgery, chemo and radiation, Jane hosted the second international ACES Conference, co-hosted by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, then of the Center for Youth Wellness, engaging and connecting hundreds of individuals from around the world. This was the second such international conference, the first being in 2016.
We invite you to share your thoughts and remembrances of Jane; how she herself influenced you, or how her efforts to raise awareness of the effects of toxic stress and the protective attributes of positive experiences benefitted your life or the life of those you love.
We plan to post a more detailed obituary in the near future.
Please share your memories by completing the Google form available at this link,Google Form for use in honoring Jane Ellen Stevens, being careful to note it if you want your comments to be posted anonymously.
We have received inquiries from people wanting to remember Jane and organizations she endorsed with a gift in her honor. One journalism nonprofit she worked with and supported is the Institute for Nonprofit News. You can also remember Jane with a tax-deductible gift to support the revitalization of PACEs Connectionhere.
Co-Directors of PACEs Connection Dana Brown and Carey Sipp are organizing a live on Zoom, Celebration of the Life and Work of Jane Stevens, to occur in mid-January 2026. Watch for this announcement in the next several days.
Photos of Jane through the years are below. More will be shared in a later, more expanded obituary and on a “memory wall” to be built with the support of those who share photos and memories of Jane using the Google Form for use in honoring Jane Ellen Stevens.
The “Legacy.com” obituary running in The San Francisco Chronicle through December 21, 2025, can be found here, if you would like to comment on it.
For those who would like to read several of Jane’s most memorable posts on PACEs Connection and other news outlets, a curated selection is shared below. If there are others you’d like to see added to the list, please share them in the comments below and we’ll review and add them as time permits.
Jane Stevens’ life, and the celebration of her life, were similar in that both were filled with stunning revelations and deep connections.
Cast as a love letter to the intrepid science journalist who founded PACEs Connection in 2012, the Valentine’s Day event’s highlights included a recounting of some of Jane’s most incredible adventures:
A trip in a research submersible to the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench (more people have walked on the moon than have visited the depths of the Mariana Trench)
Helping arrange the Olympic Circles skydivers for the 1988 Seoul games
Dancing as a Raiderette cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders
Riding in a Grumman F-14 Tomcat; carrier-capable supersonic jet and not throwing up until she was in the ladies’ room (much to the chagrin of the pilot and ground crew)
Joining three seven-week research trips on icebreakers into the Antarctic’s winter sea-ice zone leading to a print story in National Geographic Magazine and segments for National Geographic Explorer (TV) and the Discovery Channel
A recounting of some of Jane’s travels and research posts, and talents as a journalist, including:
Her four years in Kenya
Living among orangutans in Borneo
Travels through Malaysia and Africa, many with her best friend of four decades, Cherie Porter
Her renovations to houses she owned and rental units she left much improved
Her inherent ability to craft stories about science in ways that made the topics relatable
Her superpowers as an editor in taking stories by writers at PACEs Connection and making them infinitely better in record time.
One wall of photos sharing Jane Stevens’ adventures in a fighter jet, on a broncing bull, and on various trips to Antartica, Africa, and more.
Cherie Porter, Jane’s friend of close to four decades, sharing stories of their years of friendship, travel, and adventure.
As Cherie wrote of Jane in a beautiful booklet she created in Jane’s honor and shared at the celebration:
Sometime in her distant past, Jane discovered her north star when her natural skill as a storyteller linked up with her lifelong fascination with science.
She long appreciated the allure of science and that it could achieve wonderful things, but she knew that it was not infallible because it’s made by humans and, therefore, subject to all the shortcomings, biases, risks, and caveats inherent to all human endeavors.
She remained fascinated, but never lost sight of her role as a journalist. She was in service to readers, not scientists.
We remain the grateful beneficiaries.
Jane’s writing always reflected her curiosity, respect, understanding of the centrality of evidence, and an awareness of the flaws and limitations of knowledge.
Her readers felt that. They also connected with her stories because she wrote from her direct experience.
The scope of Jane’s stories required unusual research and led to extraordinary experiences.
About 50 of Jane’s friends joined Cherie to celebrate Jane’s remarkable life, career, achievements, relationships, and legacy.
L-R Carey Sipp, Alison Cebulla, Dana Brown, and Gail Kennedy, former PACEs Connection staffers. Carey and Dana are currently volunteer co-directors of PACEs Connection, working on the revitalization of the social network started by Jane Stevens as ACEs Connection in 2012.
Dana Brown and Carey Sipp, volunteer co-directors of PACEs Connection shared plans for the continuation of Jane’s work to create ACEs Connection. Jane started ACEs Connection in 2012 to raise awareness of the 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which she wrote about in scores of articles in the 26 years after she learned about it, soon after it was published by Kaiser Permanente and The Centers for Disease Control.
Jane changed the name of the social network from ACEs Connection to PACEs Connection in 2021, to reflect the importance and findings of the Positive Childhood Experiences (PCE) Research study published in the Journal of American Medicine, Pediatrics, in 2019.
The study revealed the powerful protective and preventive impact of positive childhood experiences. Promoting this science tied into the purpose of the ACEs science movement to prevent and heal childhood trauma, and to promote resilience and positive childhood and community experiences (PCEs).
Jane’s love of creating and sharing positive experiences, of writing, science, and friendships was evident in the celebration of her life and the stories shared.
“It’s an honor that Carey and I can continue Jane’s legacy of sharing this science she respected and wrote about so much. There were donors to PACEs Connection at the event, donors and supporters. It was especially wonderful for us to be able to share with them that we are close to announcing a revitalization of PACEs Connection,” said Dana.
Photos below are of Lori Chelius, Dana Brown, Lori Dorfman, and Carey Sipp outside at Jane Stevens’ celebration of life near Sacramento, CA.
Carey Sipp, Dr. Jeoff Gordon, and Dr. Andres Sciolla share a moment at the celbration of life for Jane.
Additional resources, including some of Jane’s most read posts:
Carey Sipp 11/7/233:16 PM
This week’s episode of History. Culture. Trauma. is an excerpt from a recorded interview of Jackson Nakazawa conducted by PACEs Connection team members Carey Sipp and Natalie Audage in October, 2022, as a part of the PACEs Connection Connecting Communities One Book at a Time initiative. The initiative featured Jackson Nakazawa’s latest book, Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media. The book was published last October.In the interview, Jackson Nakazawa focuses on the impact of modern society on adolescent girls. “Anyone caring for girls today knows that our daughters, students, and girls next door are more anxious and more prone to depression and self-harming than ever before. The question that no one has yet been able to credibly answer is “Why?”
Jackson Nakazawa was clear that while she sees much to worry about girls’ mental health today, she also has hope. She offers 15 antidotes or “strategies for raising emotionally healthy girls” in the book and spoke about a several of them during the webinar from which this interview is gleaned. (See below for resources, including a link to the longer webinar interview in which she details the strategies.)Antidotes fall into three categories and include three on “the building blocks of good parent-child connection, and the importance of family connection,” six antidotes for “making her home a safe space,” and six antidotes to “bring in what the wider community can provide.” The longer webinar interview honed in on at least one antidote from each of the three categories, including making it a good experience when your daughter turns to you, the importance of “wonder”, and encouraging a sense of mastery.Jackson Nakazawa has appeared on The Today Show and NPR, and is a regular speaker at universities, including the Harvard Division of Science Library Series, Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins, Learning and the Brain, and the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. She is also the creator and founder of the narrative writing-to-heal program, which uses a process called Neural Re-Narrating to help participants recognize and override their brain’s old thought patterns and internalized stories.
Carey Sipp 