Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
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Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
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CATEGORY: COURTS Katie Rinaudo, founder of OrphanWise Source: Local 3 News Read time: 1.8 minutes This Happened A two-day training was provided April 18 and 19, 2024, in Cleveland, TN, open to the public, on Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI). The model is designed to coach parents and children on how to address problems believed to arise from negative attachment experiences in early childhood. Who Did This? The Bradley County Juvenile Court in Tennessee helped sponsor the event. Training was led by staff from OrphanWise, a local nonprofit organization. OrphanWise was founded in 2019 by Katie Rinaudo in Cleveland, TN, to disseminate the TBRI model. To expand work beyond orphans and adopted children, the organization rebranded in 2020 with a name change to CareEquip by OrphanWise. Trainers are not clinical providers. The four OrphanWise trainers in TBRI have a variety of backgrounds. Rinaudo and another staff have master’s degrees in holistic child development, one staff has a bachelor’s degree in public relations, and one staff has a master’s in international development. The Premise Trust-Based Relational Intervention® (TBRI) was developed by psychologists Karyn Purvis (deceased in 2016) and David Cross (retired) at Texas Christian University in 2000. The Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at TCU remains a training headquarters for TBRI. TBRI teaches that the emotional and behavioral problems seen in many orphans and adopted children stems from psychological stress of no or limited attachment connections which permanently damages brains. TBRI attempts to reverse that damage by coaching caregivers to provide love, trust, and model attachment behaviors. The treatment principles of TBRI aim to impose emotional regulation on children through caregiver actions that include: (1) make children feel safe with smooth and predictable transitions during the day, (2) address sensory processing deficits for touch and food textures, (3) address excessive sensitivity to hunger cues with nutritional snacks and water every two hours, (4) improve sleep hygiene, (5) regular physical activity, (6) encourage touch and eye contact, and (7) practice attunement between children and caregivers [1]. The Purvis Institute’s mission is to expand the use of TBRI into “juvenile justice, child welfare (congregate care, foster care), medical, legal, law enforcement, education, mental health, advocacy, and beyond” [2]. Analysis As Trauma Dispatch has reported, many types of trauma-informed trainings are held around the Western world, and especially in the United States, all with the grand ambition to embed the unproven and discredited narrative that stress and trauma damage the brain. TBRI is unique for its primary focus on attachment disturbances. The founders of TBRI repeatedly call it an evidence-based intervention, yet it meets none of the traditional criteria for being evidence-based because it has never been studied with a control group. It’s not clear how TBRI interventions can be implemented in juvenile justice as there are no known studies in that setting. It's also not clear how a model that was developed for working with children who had been infants in orphanages can translate to working with adolescent criminals. The notion that some or most criminals just need love and trust that they never received in childhood has been a hypothesis of humanitarian reformers for decades, but that belief has never survived tests in the real world. Criminals tend to lack empathy and remorse for their actions, and no therapeutic intervention has succeeded in creating those outcomes de novo. The main reason for holding a training in Bradley County appears to be that OrphanWise is based in Cleveland, which is the largest city in Bradley County. The county is home to only 110,000 people and the rate of violent crime is lower than the national average [3]. REFERENCES [1] Karyn B. Purvis, David R. Cross, Donald F. Dansereau, Sheri R. Parris (2013). Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI): A Systemic Approach to Complex Developmental Trauma, Child & Youth Services, 34:360–386, 2013, DOI: 10.1080/0145935X.2013.859906 [2] Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development. Texas Christian Univesity, https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/tbri/. Accessed 5/14/24. [3] Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime Data Explorer. https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend. Accessed 5/17/24. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, Director of Clinical Services, Paths for Families Source: Paths for Families press release Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened. Paths for Families, a nonprofit organization in Maryland, announced April 8, 2024 that it was awarded $770,000 by the state to implement trauma-informed services in Prince George’s County high schools. Who Did This? The funding comes from the Maryland General Assembly under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The Blueprint was a major piece of legislation passed in 2021 that made comprehensive changes to Maryland’s public education system that spans pre-K to high school, with a priority on diversity and equity of outcomes. Among other changes, it mandated access to mental health practitioners for students and professional development for school staff on how to provide trauma–informed interventions. Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, director of clinical services at Paths for Families, said “Our team has worked with populations in need of trauma-responsive care for more than three decades, so we're uniquely qualified to serve this critical community need.” The Premise In 2021, Maryland embarked on a massive plan for investing $3.8 billion over ten years to raise the quality of public education because various metrics showed mediocre performance, including large academic achievement gaps based on race and income [1]. One of the recommendations to elevate under-performing students was to institute “broad and sustained new academic, social service, and health supports for students and schools that need them the most,” which, to a large degree, meant trauma-informed care. The premise of this strategy is based on the belief that trauma is a source, perhaps the main source, of a vast array of mental and physical problems for dysfunctional individuals in society. The $770,000 funding to Paths for Families was for only one of Maryland’s twenty-three counties for just a 16-month period. Prince George’s is the second most populated county in the state. According to the press release, Paths for Families will provide evidence-based counseling to high school students living in foster care or with an adoptive parent. They will also conduct trauma-informed care trainings for teachers and staff at all 33 high schools in the county. Analysis The strategy to provide evidence-based counseling to high school students sounds potentially helpful, but there are a number of problems with these types of programs. Uptake and effectiveness are notoriously poor with counseling for youths and families who are not seeking it. Providing counseling to youths does not provide the same guarantee of benefits as providing medical care such as vaccinations, medications, eye care, and dental care. In addition, the counseling is likely to be school-based, on the grounds that this makes access easier for youths. There is, however, little to no data that shows school-based produces better, or even equal, uptake or results than office-based. Plus, it has the disadvantages of minimizing parental involvement and problematic issues of maintaining confidentiality for students. Further, there is zero good scientific evidence that treating trauma leads to remediation of learning problems or school achievement on a public health scale. Details of the training for teachers to be provided by Paths for Families were not listed, but if it is like all other trauma-informed trainings it will be based on the doctrines of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and toxic stress, which teach that stress and trauma permanently damage brains, cause a huge swath of physical diseases, and cause most of the problems of disadvantaged groups in society. Despite a consensus of a subgroup of medical and social sciences researchers who advocate for this ideology, none of the claims based on ACEs and toxic stress have been proven. The claims are based on poorly-designed cross-sectional studies and one-sided interpretations of data to fit their worldview. Why Is This Happening? Over the past decade, dozens of programs nearly identical to this have emerged over the country, mostly in counties and states controlled by progressive leftist legislators. They are based on an ideology that human nature is highly malleable from life experiences, which is the basis of a larger suite of progressive doctrines that attempt to explain disadvantages and minority groups as products of oppression which require government control and intervention. REFERENCES [1] Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education (December 2020). Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Final Report. Department of Legislative Services, Annapolis, MD. Accessed 5/10/2024. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: COUNTY Zoe Lyons, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Jackson County Director Source: Washtenaw County government Read time: 3.4 minutes This Happened On April 9, 2024, Washtenaw County government posted on their website about how their Handle With Care Program is successful. Who Is Doing This? Washtenaw County, MI, and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services The Premise The Handle With Care program appears at first glance to be a simple and innocent-looking intervention. According to the Michigan Implementation Guide: "The Handle With Care Model: If a law enforcement officer encounters a child during a call, that child’s name and three words, HANDLE WITH CARE, are forwarded to the school before the school bell rings the next day. The school implements individual, class and whole school trauma-sensitive strategies so that traumatized children are “Handled With Care.” If a child needs more intervention, on-site trauma-focused mental healthcare is available at the school."[1] The types of situations officers are instructed to report include life-threatening traumas and everyday stressors of neglect, betrayal of trust, the normal loss of a loved one, illness in a caregiver, bullying, and witnessing police activity. The program was first piloted in West Virginia in 2013. Headquartered at the West Virginia Center for Children’s Justice, the program spread to other states. In 2017, the program was launched in Michigan by Zoe Lyons of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services in Jackson County. The program next spread to Eaton and Washtenaw counties in 2018, and now, according to Second Wave Michigan [2], it is in 49 of 83 Michigan counties. The post noted that since February 2018, when the program was launched, Washtenaw County schools–public and private–have received 3,796 Handle With Care notices from law enforcement officers. The post did not include the number of children in the notices or the base rate of the number of total students in the county. Each notice can include multiple children. Based on a different source [2}, each notice averages 1.5 children, meaning that the 3,796 notices probably involved over 5,700 children. This averages to over 1,100 children annually. The Washtenaw Intermediate School District (WISD) website lists a base rate of 43,482 total students in approximately 130 schools. Hence, notices are received on about 2.5% of students annually. How do schools handle these children differently? First, teachers are instructed to observe for signs of distress, such as inattention, crying, anger, or withdrawal. Then, teachers may reteach a lesson, postpone a test, or suggest the student can go to the nurse’s station to take a nap. If distress is more severe, teachers can call in the school counselor who may meet with the student and may or may not decide to contact parents in order to initiate a referral to outside counseling. The only type of evidence of success in the post was an anecdote when “a substitute teacher looked up to see a student in her class crying. Because she’d seen the notice, she knew to check in with the girl right away, and to refer her to the school social worker for follow-up care.” Analysis “Wanting to help is not the same as helping.” Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy (2024) This program raises at least five concerns. (1) It is probably not harmless. The program is an intervention for individuals and families who are not seeking one. The field of psychology has been down this road before with research on critical incident stress debriefing which showed repeatedly that making people talk immediately following stressful events often made them worse. The Handle With Care program advises teachers to not ask children to talk about their events, but if they proceed to the higher step of sending them to school counselors, that seems inevitably what will happen. (2) It is a breach of confidentiality. This program flies past the safeguards that other professions, such as health care systems, work under. Federal laws protect the privacy of patients. Doctors face sanctions for disclosing details about patient visits and even for acknowledging that patients attended their clinics. The privacy laws serve to prevent health care professionals from disclosing sensitive information about individuals that could harm the reputations of patients or influence the services they receive (or do not receive). There are few extreme situations where doctors are allowed to violate that privacy. (3) Parents are left out of the loop. The school does not call the student’s home when notices are received or acted upon. It’s a concern that some teachers may use this sensitive information to gain confidence with children or drive wedges between their parents. With the recent revelations that a subset of teachers and schools have implemented critical race theory teaching open racism towards whites, and fostered gender transition activities hidden from parents, it’s not so clear any more how some teachers perceive their role in society. (4) Teachers don’t need notices to pay attention to their students. Teachers already observe their students and make accommodations as needed every day. Also, there are already federal laws for public schools to create accommodations for children with emotional and behavioral problems. The program seems to assert, without data, that teachers don’t already notice changes in their students or make accommodations. It’s not clear that this program provides skills to teachers that they don’t already have. (5) The program is impossible to evaluate. There are no data on what teachers actually do with notices or whether the things they do make any difference for children. It is conceivable that 99% of the notices are unnecessary because children are not distressed, and/or teachers ignore the notices. There is no way to measure whether the effort and taxpayer money invested in the programs make a substantial difference. The only testimony that the program helps is anecdotes. The old maxim, however, “anecdotes are not evidence” is fitting. Why Is This Happening? The program teaches the unproven doctrines of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and toxic stress that stress and trauma permanently damage brains and physical health. If this is believed, then interventions must be implemented to prevent and alleviate stress on a massive public health scale. This program creates another entry point to indoctrinate professionals in the ACEs and toxic stress narratives. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. REFERENCES [1] Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (2019), Handle With Care Michigan Implementation Guide. https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Folder4/Folder12/Folder3/Folder112/Folder2/Folder212/Folder1/Folder312/Handle_With_Care_Implementation_Guide_Final.pdf?rev=f6d24de6ca41417494783ffb6f37518e. Accessed 5/7/2024. [2] Slootmaker E (December 8, 2022), State program helps Michigan schools handle students with extra care if they've experienced trauma, Second Wave Michigan. https://www.secondwavemedia.com/features/handlewithcare12082022.aspx. Accessed 5/7/24. CATEGORY: COURTS Senator Bob Menendez, (D) New Jersey Source: New York Post Read time: 2.3 minutes This Happened On May 3, 2024, multiple news outlets reported that attorneys for Sen. Bob Menendez wished to argue that the senator is afflicted with “intergenerational trauma” which created a mental condition that causes him to stockpile his valuables at home. Menendez is scheduled to go to trial next week on charges that he accepted bribes in the form of cash and gifts in exchange for his political influence. Who Did This? Bob Menendez is serving his third term as a senator from New Jersey. He was charged in 2023 with accepting bribes in exchange for his political influence. He had been charged on a different bribery matter in 2015 but a jury could not reach a verdict. He is the first sitting senator to be charged on two unrelated criminal matters. The attorneys for Menendez wrote a letter to the judge as part of their legal strategy to present evidence of his intergenerational trauma. The strategy became known only because the letter was made public by government prosecutors. Karen Rosenbaum, M.D. was named as the expert who would testify to the claims. Rosenbaum, who has a private practice in Manhattan, completed a forensic psychiatry fellowship, and has testified in other cases. She lists on her personal website that she holds a Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery Certification from Harvard University. On Rosenbaum’s personal blog site, she has authored posts favorable to Black Lives Matter and the concept of structural racism in America. Karen Rosenbaum, M.D., forensic psychiatrist Prosecutors stated that if the judge allows this strategy, they must be allowed to have their own psychiatrist evaluate Menendez. The Claim When investigators searched Menendez’s home in June 2022, they found $480,000 in cash—much of it stashed in clothing and closets—and 13 gold bars. The claim of intergenerational trauma appears to be a legal strategy to provide an innocent explanation of the stashed valuables. The letter to the judge reportedly stated that Dr. Rosenbaum would explain that intergenerational trauma was caused by his parents being immigrants from Cuba; their funds were taken by the Cuban government and they were left with little cash that they had stashed in their home. Since Menendez was born in New York City, it’s not clear if Menendez observed his parents stash cash in their home while growing up in America or if he learned of it from stories about Cuba. In addition, his behavior of stashing valuables was a coping mechanism that developed after his father, a compulsive gambler, committed suicide after Menendez stopped paying his father's gambling debts. It was not reported when his father died. Despite these mental health problems, the letter stated that Menendez never received treatment. Analysis Intergenerational trauma is neither an accepted diagnosis nor a validated type of trauma. The theory of intergenerational transmission of trauma, however, is immensely popular despite being controversial and unproven. The theories of how transmission occurs are fuzzy but tend to be of two main types. One type posits that thoughts and behaviors pass from one unconscious mind (the parent) to another unconscious mind (the child) by repetition. Children observe or somehow intuit parental psychodynamics. The mechanism of how that happens, whether it be psychodynamic or physiological in nature, is unproven. A second type is a physiobiological mechanism that involves epigenetics. As parents engage in maladaptive behaviors (e.g., stashing cash) with concurrent psychological stress, abnormal methylation of their DNA occurs, causing changes in gene expression. These methylations somehow get physically transmitted to children. This is highly controversial, and seems impossible, because only chromosomes, not transitory methylations, are passed from parent to child in sexual reproduction. Despite the mysterious and missing details about intergenerational transmission of trauma, or probably because of them, the theory has often been used to explain many perceived social injustices for advocacy movements. Why Is This Happening? Blaming criminal behavior on trauma historically has been a frequent tactic for defendants in desperate legal situations. Intergenerational transmission of trauma is a relatively new twist on that tactic. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Can you model social change as linear line graphs? The Cincinnati City Council presentation5/4/2024
CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: CITY Daniel Chen, DrPH, George Washington University Source: Cincinnati City Council Read time: 2.4 minutes plus a short video This Happened A professor of public health demonstrated a “system dynamics modeling” software program as one component of a larger plan to persuade Cincinnati city government to implement systemic social changes. The professor was one of six presenters in the group who came before a committee of the Cincinnati City Council on April 2, 2024. Who Did This? Daniel Chen, DrPH, from the Global Health Department of George Washington University’s school of public health, presented the software. He has been the first author on one peer-reviewed paper and secondary author on five others focused mostly on trauma-informed care. The Presentation Chen’s software demonstration was one component of a larger strategy claiming that adverse childhood experiences (ACE) cause permanent brain and body damage that leads to a wide variety of mental problems, physical diseases, and social dysfunctions. Hence, the group argued, government investments are needed to relieve these stressors. The purpose of the software modeling is to provide a tool for policy makers to make informed decisions. Chen said his system dynamics modeling was based on 300 variables and about 500 equations. For the first simulation, Chen input a “policy lever” on the model’s dashboard—a program to provide financial assistance for renters to become homeowners. The model then spit out a line graph to show how the percentage of homeowners increased every year. A bit later, Chen input another policy lever to provide financial assistance to prevent foreclosures, and again, this produced a line graph, this time showing, predictably, fewer foreclosures every year. Lastly, Chen ran both policy levers simultaneously to show how they would impact “population health” by increasing the number of individuals with Good or Excellent Health. Analysis One concern about modeling of complex public health problems, in general, has been unreliability. Take, for instance, the infamous Imperial College London model at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that predicted peak mortalities above 215 deaths per million in Great Britain. This announcement played a large role world-wide to drive harsh distancing measures and lockdowns. In reality, Great Britain flattened the curve at 13.9 deaths per million [1]. The COVID model failed because the humans using it made pessimistic and unchanging guesses about the infection rate, death rate, time to recovery, and the rate of passing the virus between persons. In addition, it did not account for motivations to misattribute deaths to COVID, how lockdowns would prolong the epidemic, or how therapeutics would shorten it. Put simply, almost nothing in nature or human society changes in a straight line. The video (below) shows the first simulation. As noted above, Chen inputs a “policy lever” on the model’s dashboard—a program, called ADDI, to provide financial assistance for renters to become homeowners. He set the lever at 1% in the neighborhood of Avondale starting in 2025, meaning that of 4,085 renters, 40 would become homeowners the next year, and 1% more would be added in each successive year. The percentage of homeowners increased from about 25% in 2025 to a nearly miraculous 50% in 2055. As you watch the line graph in the upper right, note how it is a perfectly straight upward-trending line for thirty years. Another concern, and perhaps the inherent fatal flaw of models, is that they almost never can predict how individual behaviors vary over time. Consider Daniel Partick Moynihan’s famous scissors graph in his 1965 report (below). For decades, as unemployment for nonwhite males rose or fell, applications for welfare logically rose or fell in tandem. But in 1960, something changed; unemployment dropped but applications for welfare increased. Moynihan attributed this to a shift in Black family structure towards single-parent households. Put simply, almost nothing changes in the real world as policy makers intend. In the graph above, note how, starting in 1960, unemployment and applications for Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) welfare assistance suddenly went in opposite directions [2]. When showing models in this manner to legislators, it can easily be misleading:
Chen and his group pitched the model as being based on empirical evidence, when actually it’s based on a utopian idea that everything goes according to their plan. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. References [1] Boretti A. After Less Than 2 Months, the Simulations That Drove the World to Strict Lockdown Appear to be Wrong, the Same of the Policies They Generated. Health Serv Res Manag Epidemiol. 2020 Jun 17;7:2333392820932324. doi: 10.1177/2333392820932324. PMID: 32596417; PMCID: PMC7301657. [2] Daniel Geary, The Moynihan Report: An annotated edition, The Atlantic, September 14, 2015. Accessed May 4, 2024. |
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