Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
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CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: STATE Bill sponsors, clockwise from top left: Dafna Michaelson Jenet (D), Brianna Titone (D), Nancy Todd (D), and Dennis Hisey (R) Source: 9News Denver and Colorado H.B.20-1312 Read time: 2.7 minutes plus video This Happened Denver’s 9News outlet ran a story April 4, 2024 on the implementation of Colorado’s new mandate for training of teachers in trauma-informed practices (TIP). The law was passed and took effect in 2020. Who Did This? Sponsors of the bill were Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet (D) (now a state senator), Rep. Brianna Titone (D), Sen. Dennis Hisey (R) (served one term before losing reelection in 2022), and Sen. Nancy Todd (D) (left office in 2021 after a sixteen-year career). Titone, born a biological male, was the first openly transgender person elected to the Colorado legislature. The Premise The theory of TIP is that trauma-exposed individuals ought to be sensitively handled by professionals in many spheres to both prevent worsening through re-traumatization and promote healing through new knowledge and skills. The mandate comes from Colorado Statute § 22-60.5-110, Section 3.f., which dictates conditions for renewal of professional teacher licenses. It includes the following:
The text of the bill did not provide a rationale as to why this type of training would facilitate teachers’ skills and competence in the delivery of academic instruction. While the law covers teachers in all grades, the 9News story focused on the launch of the mandate within Colorado’s universal pre-K program. Anchor Corey Rose chatted with Dr. Rosemarie Allen, the station’s “race and equity expert.” Allen’s doctorate is in Equity and Leadership in Education; she is the president and CEO for the nonprofit Institute for Racial Equity and Excellence which licenses child care providers in Colorado. In the 1.3-minute video below, Dr. Allen asserted that trauma impacts child development, and this new training will give teachers “amazing strategies.” Analysis The premise of TIP is based on several controversial assertions. (1) It is based on the ideology that trauma permanently damages the brain and derails child development, neither of which are proven. (2) The concept of TIP is not a clear or testable theory. TIP can be any or all of the following: train professionals, professional self-care, educate victims, teach coping skills, tweak customer service to avoid retraumatizing victims, arrange environments to make people feel safer, include trauma victims in advisory roles, track customer satisfaction outcomes, communicate between service areas, allow drop-in service, change hiring practices, create women-only environments, and, of course, direct clinical care to treat trauma symptoms. Many of these do not represent evident mechanisms or effective paths to improve victim outcomes. (3) Besides direct clinical care, the interventions by themselves or in combination have not been shown to consistently improve mental health or learning outcomes. Nearly all the non-clinical studies on TIP have measured perceptions of professionals on whether they believe they and/or their workplace are better informed or more competent. (4) In regards to school settings, it is controversial whether teachers ought to be assuming responsibilities that have previously belonged only to parents to intervene in social and emotional issues outside their scope of expertise. The Colorado legislature estimated the cost of this program to the state to be between $8,000 to $600,000. Why Is This Happening? Despite assertions by supporters, TIP is not an empirically-driven scientific model. It is an ideological-based movement consistent with progressive leftist ideas that humans are highly malleable. Statutes like this have been adopted in a growing number of states and cities to authorize government interventions in a wide range of environments. Direct clinical trauma care, based on evidence, and delivered with common sense of sensitive and empathic professionals, has been commonly available for over three decades. What’s new in TIP is the mandate to train non-clinical professionals and trauma victims on an ideology, embed this model into statute, and create new administrative agencies and infrastructures that will inevitably increase in size and cost over time. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies logo Written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: ~2.5 minutes To solve complex social problems, at least two things are needed: (1) Policy makers need information outside their areas of expertise in digestible formats, and (2) that information often must come from scientists. Scientists’ reason to exist in society is, in distilled form, to extract truth from the natural world for the rest of us. For psychological trauma, the main organization of scientists is the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). The worldview of those who contribute to ISTSS recommendations, however, does not always represent what the evidence says about trauma. Since its founding in 1985 as the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (“International” was added in 1990), the Society has done more than any other organization, by far, for the promotion of good science and competent clinical work to assess and treat trauma victims. They have published the main journal for trauma research, the Journal of Traumatic Stress, since 1988, and hold an annual conference every November. I joined in 1994 and presented my work at nearly every annual conference for twenty-three years. I, like almost all trauma researchers, considered it my professional home. I was “sort-of famous” within the group as one member told me when seeing my name tag at a conference. I attended my last ISTSS conference, however, in 2017. I had been dreading the conferences for several years because, in part, the presentations were increasingly uninformative lectures about events that were not traumas or theories that weren’t true. I had tried to keep it interesting for myself by going to the audience microphone in the question-and-answer periods, but if I dared question their dogmas, presenters stared back blankly as if I had just suggested killing their pets. Viewpoint diversity? No thanks. Due to the nature of trauma, ISTSS had always been forced to struggle with slapdash research and dubious ideas. What’s new has been the rise of advocacy. The rise was gradual, and perhaps inevitable, as the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became increasingly well-known through the 1990s and 2000s. By 2005, advocacy was on steroids. Activist-minded researchers expanded the notion of trauma well beyond life-threatening experiences to include everyday stress experiences (e.g., neglect, emotional abuse, divorce, poverty) in order to draw attention. Complex PTSD was tacitly accepted as a valid disorder even though there is zero validation data and it had been savaged by multiple experts [1-3]. The concept of toxic stress—that psychological trauma permanently damages the brain—was embraced as canon by invited keynote speakers and Society reports even though the only supporting human data comes from weak cross-sectional studies. Pre-trauma prospective studies fail to support it. Climate change was endorsed as a source of trauma in an ISTSS brief even though the level of threat and the man-made theory have been debunked by many credible scientists, and, even if it were true, is more of an everyday stress than a life-threatening trauma. The list goes on to racial trauma, historical trauma, intergenerational transmission of trauma and other unproven theories. In the 2023 conference program, nearly a third of the symposia were ideologically-based on complex PTSD, toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, equity, race, COVID, or other non-trauma experiences. Why Did This Happen? These theories were invoked for the humanitarian project to conquer suffering at the expense of other virtues that parallels the progressive leftist agenda of the past century. ISTSS got a late start, but its evolution has tracked closely to the progressive ideological capture of academia in general, including the acceleration of more radical woke movements in the past decade. The mission of ISTSS has been impacted by trauma activists to become a diluted archive of uncritical psychology, politics, sociology, and anthropology based on emotional appeals to perfect society, presented as science. The cost of this advocacy is high. One cannot endlessly redefine concepts to suit activist needs irrespective of data without eventually sacrificing truth, honesty, and holding the respect of others. While ISTSS still holds a seat at the table for publishing and presenting good studies, as long as they don’t contradict the canon too directly, policy makers should not mistake it for behaving with a purity of mission to find truth. REFERENCES [1] Shawn P. Cahill et al., "Sequential Treatment for Child Abuse-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Methodological Comment on Cloitre, Koenen, Cohen, and Han (2002)," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 72 (2004): 543-548. [2] Dean G. Kilpatrick. "A special section on complex trauma and a few thoughts about the need for more rigorous research on treatment efficacy, effectiveness, and safety," Journal of Traumatic Stress 18 (2005): 379-384, p. 383. [3] Patricia A. Resick et al. "A Critical Evaluation of the Complex PTSD Literature: Implications for DSM-5," Journal of Traumatic Stress 25 (2012): 241-251 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Robert Allan Shapiro, M.D. Source: Cincinnati City Council Read time: 3.2 minutes plus a four-minute video This Happened A coalition of scientists and community activists made a lengthy presentation to a committee of the Cincinnati City Council on April 2, 2024. Their aim was to formally present the underlying science and scope of their proposed model for government action to commence large-scale systemic change by trying to address stress and trauma as underlying causes of inequity in child outcomes. Who Did This? The scientist in the coalition tasked with presenting the brain science data was pediatrician Robert Shapiro, M.D. of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Shapiro completed his pediatric medicine training in 1984. He has been the secondary author on twelve peer-reviewed studies that covered mostly child abuse, adverse childhood experiences, and parent coaching. He has not been the first author on a paper, been the principal investigator on a research grant, or studied brain imaging. The Presentation The 1.6 hour presentation employed the usual logic of the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) narrative that stress and trauma cause permanent brain and body damage that leads to a wide variety of mental problems, physical diseases, and social dysfunctions. Shapiro’s first slide was a side-by-side comparison of two MRI brain scans labeled No Maltreatment and Maltreated (see above). The number of purple circles and connecting lines is obviously fewer in the Maltreated brain. In the four minute video clip below, Shapiro initially gave a vague explanation of the figure, then the chairwoman redirected him to give a clearer explanation, which was still vague, and then another council member, still confused, asked him bluntly, “Doctor, what do the purple spots represent?” Analysis Shapiro understood almost nothing accurately about the brain scans. A reference was not given for the original study that produced the brain scans. We were, however, able to locate it within a few seconds with Google Image. The original study was Teicher et al. (2014) in Biological Psychiatry.[1] The original figure is shown below for comparison. The figure represents centrality of one brain area in relation to over one hundred other possible brain areas. Centrality was based on cortical thickness of an area, meaning, very roughly, if two areas have relatively greater thickness they are considered to be connected to a greater degree. The connecting lines and the size of the circles were based on a complex permutation of four different centrality measures. In sum, each figure is presumed to show how a network of connectivity emanates from one brain area (the green circle). Shapiro never mentioned centrality or connectivity. Teicher et al. found significant differences in networks emanating from nine different brain areas. They made figures for only three of them, and Shapiro presented only one of the figures. Greater centrality was shown in the Not Maltreated group compared to the Maltreated group for the left anterior cingulate, which is the only figure Shapiro showed. Greater centrality was shown, however, in the Maltreated group compared to the Not Maltreated group for the right anterior insula and the right precuneus, which are the two figures Shapiro omitted, and those are reproduced below. Obviously, if Shapiro had shown these two figures, the status of brains of the Maltreated group vis-a-vis the Not Maltreated group would have appeared much more complex. Other misinformation from Dr. Shapiro:
When showing brains scans in this manner to legislators, it raises many concerns. For example, the legislators were not told that this represented one of several ways to measure connectivity. They did not know that this method of measuring so-called connectivity was based on cortical thickness of structures. It was not based on functional MRI that showed brains in action; it was not based on blood flow to areas or on neuronal activity. They were not told that this research is based on a shaky assumption that increased connectivity between two brain regions somehow stimulates cortical thickness growth during brain development. The mechanism of how that stimulation might happen is mysterious. They were not told that this study has never been replicated. They were not told that other methods for measuring connectivity do not fully replicate these results. They were not told that the data were limited by being cross-sectional, meaning that the connectivity patterns probably pre-existed any life events and more likely represent vulnerability or resilience factors, and are not the outcomes of life events. They were not told that connectivity maps do not yet reliably equate with functional importance like behaviors, symptoms, or morals. Any connection between connectivity maps and real-life function is assumed. The presentation obviously worked. It is clear the three council members were enthusiastic about the program. In trying to solve complex social problems, legislators must rely on scientists for truth. When scientists become persuaders for a cause, this often corrupts the process. As Paul Cairney, a professor of politics and public policy, wrote, the danger, or perhaps the intended outcome, of effective persuasion, is that “scientists may exaggerate scientific consensus on ‘the evidence’ when they become advocates.” [2] Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. References [1] Martin H. Teicher, Carl M. Anderson, Kyoko Ohashi, Ann Polcari (2014). Childhood Maltreatment: Altered Network Centrality of Cingulate, Precuneus, Temporal Pole and Insula. Biological Psychiatry 76(4): 297-305, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.09.016. [2] Paul Cairney, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: CITY Wendy Ellis, Dr.P.H., Assistant Professor, George Washington University Source: WCPO ABC 9 news Read time: 1.7 minutes This Happened On April 2, 2024, a committee of the Cincinnati City Council hosted a presentation titled Building Equitable & Resilient Neighborhoods. This was the latest step in a process over recent years by a coalition of community leaders demanding government action for large-scale systemic change by trying to address stress and trauma as underlying causes of inequity in child outcomes. Who Did This? The coalition consists of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the University of Cincinnati, and George Washington University’s Center for Community Resilience. The group presentation was led by Wendy Ellis, Assistant Professor at George Washington University. Her 2019 dissertation was a model that conceptualizes adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as outcomes of systems driven by institutional racism; and these outcomes, including racial disparities in evictions, income inequity, and economic mobility, must be addressed through public health initiatives. The Premise The coalition is trying to press city government to adopt new policies and enact reforms aimed at addressing trauma because they assert those cause inequities in child well-being outcomes. Their language tends to emphasize trauma, but their model includes everyday stress experiences—household disruption, parental incarceration, food insecurity, and poverty—that are not life-threatening trauma. Proposed reforms include to alleviate poverty (cash assistance, child tax credits), increase entitlements (preschool and childcare), educate children on relationship skills, educate parents on how to parent, provide mentoring and after-school programs, and teach everyone about the ACEs narrative. Analysis Consistent with the postmodern trauma activism of the past several decades that draws extraordinary causal interpretations from shaky science, these ACEs models claim to understand for the first time in history what drives nearly all human suffering. It cannot be overemphasized that supporters of ACE movements intend large-scale expansion of entitlements and government power. Their intent is to “transform,” as the subtitle of the presentation stated: “Vision: Transform the City of Cincinnati into a national beacon of healing, community resilience, and racial justice by centering the experiences and interests of trauma exposed children and families in organizational planning, partnerships, and policies.” Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and other cities have embarked on similar public health models based on the ACEs narrative. Each are different in details and stage of implementation, but none have achieved major success. No reports from these models have provided evidence that these strategies work. It is unlikely the programs can work because the ACE research on which they are built is controversial and unproven. Dr. Ellis says “The science is clear,” but she and other ACE supporters seem unaware that all ACE research comes from cross-sectional studies that have zero power to prove causative links. Another concern, besides the science, is that none of this reform for large-scale culture shift has been adequately presented to or voted on by the public, who are mostly unaware of what is happening. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Jack Shonkoff, M.D., founder of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Source: The Trouble With Trauma Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened For the past two decades, a Harvard pediatrician and his university-funded center spearheaded the invention and dissemination of the term “toxic stress” and helped create an international phenomenon that has persuaded much of the world that there is a public health crisis. Who Did This? Jack Shonkoff is a highly-respected pediatrician, who, over a nearly forty-year career, has over 150 publications, and has been honored with many awards and influential positions. In 2006, he founded the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University with the intention of using scientific knowledge to address the problems of children dealing with adversity. The Premise Shortly before founding the Center, Shonkoff created the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. This council of experts crafted a framework around the concept of “toxic stress” on how to improve outcomes for children. The framework was distilled into a policy-guided-by-science playbook with four steps: 1) Emphasize that we’ve hit a wall. A massive list of poor outcomes— poverty, poor academic performance, crime, drug abuse, murder, domestic violence, and multigenerational racism— just will not go away with current efforts. 2) Claim that it’s nearly all due to stress and trauma. Children experience high rates of trauma, violence, poverty, neglect, racism, and rampant disparities. By assertion, any rational person can see that stress and trauma must be the causes of poor outcomes and represent the roots of social class disparities in health. 3) Super-charge the claim as permanent biological damage. To make matters more urgent, assert that these experiences of stress and trauma cause permanent damage to brains and bodies. 4) Billions must be invested in trauma-informed approaches. This situation constitutes a public health crisis, perhaps the greatest of all, and the commensurate response must be massive prevention and intervention programs in the realm of public health. Analysis The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, despite what one might infer from its name, is not a council representing the nation; it is a private group of eleven-members, four of whom are from Harvard. They were likely hand-picked for their shared vision that concurs with the toxic stress narrative. Toxic stress is not a scientific term. The Council’s own literature is surprisingly candid in acknowledging that they invented the term toxic stress. The members of the Council agreed to create and disseminate the phrase toxic stress to convey their message to the public because, by their own admission, “just saying ‘stress’ more loudly wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go”[1] To fashion credibility for the concept of toxic stress, they invented two other types of stress: positive stress and tolerable stress. These types were not based on validation from science. The Council’s unswerving assertion that stress and trauma cause poor outcomes and permanent brain damage is, in fact, controversial and has not held up under pre-trauma prospective studies in humans [2-4]. The Council has been shy about acknowledging that one hundred percent of the adverse child experiences studies they cite to support their assertions have been cross-sectional surveys, which have zero power to prove causative theories. Prior to 2009, the phrase toxic stress had never been used, except by the pediatrician Shonkoff, in a peer-reviewed science journal to describe a cause of human psychological problems. Despite the shaky evidence base for the concept of toxic stress, it has proven highly attractive, and implementations of the playbook have become commonplace in a relatively short span of about ten years. Why Is This Happening? The idea that humans are highly malleable, such that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences, and that individual differences in success or failure are due almost wholly to outside forces as opposed to unchanging personal traits caused by genetics, is consistent with the progressive liberal agenda of the past hundred years. As described in The Trouble With Trauma [5], one speculation to explain the driving motives of progressives can be based on moral foundations theory: This type of activism is driven by individuals with skewed moral foundations that disproportionately favor care for the disadvantaged even when it defies the evidence and may constrain other moral concerns such as individual freedom, tradition, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty. Should This Be Attempted? The toxic stress/ACEs playbook is based on a fatal conceit of believing that we possess the knowledge of what causes disparate social and behavioral outcomes for children, and that much, and perhaps all, of that cause is trauma and adversity. Attempting to guide policies with knowledge that we do not in fact possess, is likely to cause much waste and harm. REFERENCES [1] Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. "A Decade of Science Informing Policy: The Story of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child," (2014). [2] Julia A. DiGangi et al. “Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature.” Clinical Psychology Review 33 (2013):728-744. [3] Andrea Danese et al. "The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians," American Journal of Psychiatry 174 (2017): 349-361. [4] Michael S. Scheeringa. "Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms," International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research (2020). [5] Michael S. Scheeringa (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 2.9 minutes Two people can look at the same artwork and come to different opinions. Many have hailed writer and director Todd Phillip’s Joker as a visionary commentary on society that tapped into a profound zeitgeist. Others are less positive, and believe that its sympathetic portrayal of violence was misguided and could trigger more mass shootings. So, what really is the message of the film? Movie Summary The movie follows the origin story of how Arthur Fleck became the Joker. We are led to believe that Fleck suffered childhood trauma and this abuse helped to create the emaciated monster that he became as the Joker. Furthermore, he completely forgot his history of child abuse until he stole his hospital record and then all the memories came back to him. Fleck’s path to become the murderous Joker was also facilitated by a string of other misfortunes, including being bullied, fired from his job, and government defunding social programs he depended on for psychotherapy and psychiatric medications. The movie culminates in a riot in the streets inspired by the Joker’s violence meant to symbolize a counterculture rebellion against the rich. The movie inspired real-life individuals at various types of protests around the world to invoke the Joker, turned a spot in New York city where the Joker danced into a tourist spot, and it became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.
Todd Phillips (right) may be best known for a string of so-called gross out comedies including Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003), Borat (2006), and the three Hangover movies (2009, 2011, and 2013). Analysis Almost nothing about abuse, trauma, or posttraumatic stress disorder in the film was accurate. This origin story rests on the premise of two modern theories of trauma activists. The first theory is that trauma can create criminals, including mass killers. The second theory is that trauma memories can be totally repressed while having strong power over our behaviors. Both theories are discredited, yet many people insist they are true, seemingly unaware of the evidence to the contrary. The driving plot narrative is a causal theory of human nature. The reason Fleck became a broken man and then was pushed beyond his limits to become a murderer is that he was a member of the underclass, oppressed by the wealthy through their corruptions of society. It’s another parcel of the progressive leftist reframing of human nature: individuals can’t just be born bad. There must be a societal reason killers become killers. Mixed into the story is an overly simplistic beckoning for government intervention into the personal sphere; his plight could have been prevented if we had just invested more in social services. As Ann Hornaday wrote in the Washington Post, “Joker is a flagrantly seedy movie, one that constantly evokes the garbage, vermin and social apathy that New York was known for at its worst. Welcome to Gotham City, where the weak are killed and eaten.” This creates the context for an amped-up version of the wealthy stepping on the throats of the poor as the cause of their problems. In the debate of nurture versus nature as driving forces of human nature, Fleck is the victim of nurture. If not for bad life experiences, he could have reached a higher level of self-actualization. To make the point comic-bookish obvious, we see his smothered nobility blossom when he dances gracefully in a bathroom to express something noble, we’re not sure what, after his first kill. Fleck is therefore not an unempathic deviant that can be written off to genes. He’s Locke’s blank slate and Rousseau’s noble savage; with different life experiences, he could have become anything. Fleck embodies the belief that trauma can change your essential character, which is a compelling narrative but has no basis in science.
Finally, the riot at the end of the movie seems straight out of the Communist Manifesto: Marx believed that capitalism smothers the possibility of self-actualization, leaving workers permanently stunted and alienated; eventually the proletariat rises up in a revolution to wrest the levers of production from the wealthy. Why Was This Made? I can make a good guess at the political beliefs of Phoenix, but I don’t know the politics of Phillips. When controversy arose about the film’s use of violence as a means of individual and group protest, Phillips seemed genuinely surprised. When addressing this at the Venice Film Festival, Phillips said, “It’s certainly not a political film,” which caused some laughter in the press room [1]. Taking Phillips at his word, as incredible as that seems, it appears possible that Phillips truly believes the portrayal of human nature in his film is just common sense and he has no deeper reflections or doubts about his beliefs, and that may be a fair assessment of much that comes out of Hollywood that can influence our popular culture. References [1] Nancy Tartaglione (August 31, 2019). ‘Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix & Todd Phillips On Creating DC Character Study & Finding That Laugh – Venice. Deadline. (This is a revised version of a blog post by the author from 2020 at www.psychologytoday.com.) Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 3.5 minutes For some years now, progressives dominated the ranks of academia and media and have largely controlled many of the ideas and language we are exposed to. One of the primary ideas upon which many leftist agendas rise or fall is the conviction that human material is highly plastic. This is evident in the old claim by Marx that capitalism oppresses the soul of the proletariat to the new claim of modern neuroscience that trauma alters the self by changing the brain. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself,” i.e., the central progressive belief is that politics ought to be a tool to change individuals, hence, unrestrained government is justified to expand, regulate, and intervene in society. Book Summary The title of the book What Happened to You? has long been the catchphrase of the trauma-informed approach movement, and it concisely sums up the belief that humans are highly plastic. Perry and Winfrey claimed that if you received love and affection during the first two months of life, your neural development protects you from trauma with resilience. If you didn’t, your brain was permanently altered in many maladaptive ways. These alterations affect everything in your life. Literally. Everything. When you experience trauma without that resilience installed, trauma causes you to have “a different sort of world view,” shapes the very core of ourselves, determines the dosage of medications one can take, creates individuals who commit crimes, and determines personality development. It also causes drug addiction, heart disease, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, stroke, diabetes, and auto immune disease. Trauma is apparently transmissible to children just by watching parents be afraid, and can also be passed to children through birth in their genes by the mysterious and unproven mechanisms of epigenetics. They say trauma impacts “education, mental health, health, law enforcement, juvenile and criminal justice, family courts. It is impossible to find any part of society where this is not an issue.” The book is formatted as a back-and-forth conversation, with Perry in black font and Winfrey in blue font. But it’s obviously not an actual conversation. It’s largely a tag-team swapping of anecdotes to make readers’ heads swivel toward assertions about how trauma is the cause of nearly every bad thing in life. Perry “conversated” nineteen anecdotes to Winfrey’s thirteen.
Analysis Winfrey provided some of her childhood trauma story involving her demented grandfather trying to choke her grandmother. But if you’re looking for insight into how Winfrey overcame her childhood, you won’t find it here. If trauma shaped Winfrey, as the book claims trauma does to everyone to some degree, how did she become so successful? She must have had other resilience factors in her nature that other people didn’t have. Perry did not critically examine the research on any claims about trauma. He never described a single research study. Instead, Perry made broad generalizations from skewed interpretations of the science. From their book you would think experts totally agree with Perry and there are no controversies. His claims about the impact of trauma are, however, nearly all wrong. If you’re looking for the science on how trauma is associated with neurobiology, you won’t find it here. But if you’re looking for an ideology to explain your problems, this book is for you. Perry and Winfrey wield their beliefs to prove again that progressive leftists are not willing to allow empiricism to get in the way of a good theory. What is the real science? I’ve been a researcher on childhood trauma and PTSD for over thirty years, and I published some of the research that Perry and Winfrey should have read, so I think I can confidently grade Perry an F on his understanding of the science. The truth is that there are indeed many studies that show associations between PTSD with size differences in brain centers, different activations of neural networks, and different autonomic nervous system states. But it was never mentioned that those come almost entirely from cross-sectional studies, which means subjects were studied at only one point in time. Cross-sectional studies have absolutely no power to make causal conclusions. When better studies have been conducted, which are pre-trauma prospective longitudinal studies, the evidence does not support Perry and Winfrey’s extraordinary narrative that trauma can literally change your brain. Perry does have a few good things to say about treatment, but those were not based on science and they’re not new. Why Did This Happen? The book is another parcel in the trauma-informed campaign that has been spreading these beliefs across the U.S. since approximately 2000. Toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, and complex PTSD are the main pillars of the beliefs. With Winfrey’s celebrity wattage landing the book on the best-seller list, this is the media-star version of Bessel van der Kolk’s equally wrong book The Body Keeps the Score. As I’ve described in my book, The Trouble With Trauma, I think a motivation for trauma-informed supporters to hold these beliefs comes from a skewed moral foundation that leads them to believe that nurture, not nature, causes many of the problems of most victims in our society, and fighting for victims makes supporters feel worthy. Their intent is to leverage trauma as a tool to achieve culture change, acquire funding for social programs, and alter society to make reality appear seamless with their vision of liberal truth. This is a shortened and revised version of my one-star review posted on Amazon.com in 2021. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: COUNTRY Suzanne Mooney, PhD Source: BNN news Read time: 1.7 minutes This Happened A government report assessed the status of implementation efforts and new recommendations to advance their agenda for Trauma Informed Approaches (TIA). The 44-page executive summary of the report was released February 22, 2024. The full report is not yet available. Who Did This? The Safeguarding Board of Northern Ireland (SBNI), which oversees child protection and other safety issues, commissioned the report. In 2017, the government funded new administrative positions to focus on adverse childhood experiences (ACE), which produced the first report in 2019 on efforts to embed TIA. The new report is an update on the first report, and was led by Suzanne Mooney, PhD, professor of social work at Queen’s University of Belfast. The Claim The report was organized by three domains of implementation: (1) Organizational development, (2) Workforce development, and (3) Service design and delivery. The sources of data included an online survey completed by SBNI member agencies and partner organizations, eight focus group discussions with managers, and a look at four implementation projects. Because the data were perceptions of whether services had improved, there were no standardized or quantitative measures of child outcomes. The report noted that “outcomes, however, were not always clearly specified in measurable terms and it was not clear whether any current evidence existed to support” the respondents‘ perceptions that services had improved (page 27). Despite the lack of evidence, the report made recommendations to deploy TIA principles into policies, produce a “government mandate” to change policies, and create a new government agency. Analysis Trauma informed approaches present insurmountable problems for project evaluators. The concept of trauma is purposefully broad by including non-traumatic stressful experiences of everyday life. Most importantly, the theory that ACEs cause a massive range of health problems is unproven, despite the assertions to the contrary from supporters who claim the ability to find causal relationships from weak, cross-sectional research studies. The burden of proving that their actions are evidence-based ought to be on the supporters of TIA, but by their chorus of assertions that the ACE theory is fact, they have managed to put the burden on others to disprove that which is unproven. Organizing the bulk of the report around organizational development and workforce development was revealing about the stakes involved. Most of their attention is on growing the governmental administrative state. In America, this is often referred to as the “deep state," or the unelected “fourth branch” of government that was never granted law-making power in the Constitution but now dwarfs the Congress in size and power. Why Did This Happen? Attempts like this to implement TIA are derivative of the ACE movement, which is an ideology masquerading as government-by-science. The ideology that human nature is almost endlessly malleable conflicts with the evidence that genetics are highly determinative of personality and health outcomes. The science of ACEs is seriously flawed but the assertions of ACEs have proven remarkably effective for leveraging actions from leftist-leaning governments. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS: CITY Erika Rajo, PsyD, trauma psychologist Source: WDSU News Read time: 1.8 minutes plus 1.2-minute video This Happened Seeds of NOLA Trauma Recovery Center opened in early 2024 to provide free treatment and case management services for victims of trauma. Their mission: The first-ever service aiming to reduce the chronic violence in New Orleans by preventing intergenerational transmission of trauma. Who Did This? The program is part of University Medical Center. Some or all of the funding was provided by the New Orleans Department of Health. The amount and duration of the funding was not announced. The Premise According to the Center’s website, their mission is “Rooted in principles of health equity and social justice, the center provides wraparound services to people whose lives have been disrupted by traumatic injury and violent crime.” The Center’s “trauma psychologist,” Erika Rajo, PsyD, asserted that much of the violence in New Orleans is due to “unhealed trauma.” She hopes to prevent PTSD, heal trauma symptoms, and prevent intergenerational transmission of trauma, which in turn will reduce violence in the city. The Center aims to eventually provide, all at no cost to clients, individual and family psychotherapy, support groups, psychiatric medication management, case management, assertive outreach, legal assistance, and violence interrupters in the community. Analysis Intergenerational transmission of trauma. This theory postulates that parents who develop psychological problems from traumatic experiences can pass those problems to their children through the interactions of daily living and the children absorb the problems into their own minds through repetition. The theory is widely accepted despite the only type of research support for it in humans comes from cross-sectional and retrospective studies. There are no pre-trauma prospective longitudinal studies to support it. In addition, the mechanism of how transmission occurs, whether psychological or biological, is speculative and controversial. Prevention of PTSD. There is little to no evidence that PTSD can be prevented or is even possible. It is a common misconception among clinicians that there is a window of time between trauma exposure and development of PTSD symptoms. Research is clear, however, that nearly all PTSD symptoms begin immediately following trauma exposure. There is a small amount of research evidence that PTSD severity can be substantially reduced (not entirely prevented) with early intervention, but it comes from pharmacological interventions in burn patients (i.e., morphine). Psychotherapeutic interventions at early intervention have all failed, and some may have worsened symptoms. Why Did This Happen? New Orleans is among a handful of large American cities that have experimented with so-called trauma-informed approaches to tackle intractable histories of violent crime and racial inequities. The efforts have yet to produce measurable benefits. Should This Be Attempted? Efforts such as this, plus similar efforts in Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have originated as orders from executive branches of city governments or from votes of city councils without much public debate. The brief discussions that have occurred at city councils have been from invited local stakeholders who uncritically support trauma-informed ideology. Most citizens are unaware that city funds are being spent on untested approaches with little to no research support. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE Miles Teller, as Sgt. Adam Schumann Written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 3.4 minutes The understanding of human nature is today under continuous attack by government and culture. This is strange for many scientists, not in the sense of whether nature (genetics) versus nurture (life experiences) determines human nature is a valid question, but in the sense that the attacks from the progressive left are so sure that it is nearly all nurture. Trauma has been increasingly drawn into that arena as perhaps the most important element of nurture, and movies have been a frequent delivery device of that message. The Plot The 2017 movie, Thank You For Your Service, is a faithful recreation of David Finkel’s 2013 best-selling book of the same title, which followed the real-life psychological aftermath of war for Sergeant Adam Schumann and fellow soldiers. During deployment in Iraq, Schumann was a leader, a problem-solver, the one many of them trusted. Their luck, however, ran out. Men died and were maimed and Schumann blamed himself. Most of the movie takes place post-deployment, back in Kansas. One soldier panics when he finds his fiancé has left and cleaned out their house. Schumann is there to take him in. Another soldier has a traumatic brain injury and cannot remember the day of the week. Schumann is there too to get him out of jams. Schumann is happy to be home with his wife and children, but posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has its grip on him, and suicide looms as an option. Psychotherapy services at the Veterans Administration are of no immediate help. They are told it will be six to nine months to get treatment. Schumann’s wife tries to help him. A dead friend’s wife tries to help him. Schumann tries to help himself by visiting a paralyzed buddy. Improvement eventually comes, and the gracefulness of the movie is how individuals cope in a human clan. Analysis Where the movie shines is how PTSD is realistically portrayed as the never-ending struggle it is for so many. These men have a rough landing but they do not blame invented oppressors for their misfortunes. They’re fighters. They make do. They have each other’s backs. Trauma did not change them into bad men. What’s worth watching are their struggles to sort things out. This contrasts to so many other Hollywood movies where PTSD is a plot device to drive violence or ill-fated, fantastical behaviors of trauma-exposed characters who flip into psychotic murderers. The issue I’m driving at is human nature. The Founders of the United States understood human nature as unchanging both in terms of natural rights and behaviors. As Madison explained in Federalist 10, human behavior inevitably results in factions and conflicts. The Constitution formalized their understanding that the purpose of politics was to cope with the problems inherent in unchanging human nature. The radical progressive liberal agenda for the past century to rewrite much of the Constitution has been inextricably linked to reframe human nature as highly malleable (the blank slate), thus removing all restraints on how government can grow and control human lives in neo-Marxist and socialist schemes. One can argue that the central impediment to the progressive liberal woke agenda is the idea that human nature is fixed. The progressive liberal belief in the primacy of nurture—including that trauma can change your essential character—is a compelling narrative for movies but has no basis in science. Schumann, in contrast, is the living embodiment of fixed nature; trauma can rough you up but it does not change your essential character, which has a strong basis in science. (This is a revised version of a blog post by the author from 2020 at www.psychologytoday.com.) Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. |
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