​Source: Office of California Surgeon General press release
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On May 1, 2024, the Office of the California Surgeon General announced the launch of the Live Beyond campaign to increase awareness and understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress.
 
Who Did This?
The Office of the California Surgeon General runs the state’s program to improve the health of citizens by warning them of the presumed dangers of ACEs. The ACE program was started under the inaugural Surgeon General, Nadine Burke Harris, M.D. who served 2019-2022. She is a pediatrician and has a master of public health degree. Harris stepped down in 2022 but continues her advocacy for ACEs independently.
Diana Ramos, M.D. has been Surgeon General since 2022. She is an obstetrician, has a master of public health degree, and advocates for equity.
 
The Premise
The study that started the ACE movement was published in 1998. This study retrospectively reviewed patient charts and found a correlation between the number of ACEs and physical diseases including heart disease, cancer, lung disease, and obesity [1]. The advocates of ACE made a leap in interpretation to claim that ACEs cause these diseases rather than just being associated for other reasons. Dozens of similar studies have since been conducted that keeps increasing the number of linked physical disease outcomes. As the graphic below shows, the California program makes the claim that the effects of ACEs make individuals more likely to develop 9 of the 10 leading causes of death [2].

The 10 ACEs are:
Emotional, verbal abuse
Physical abuse
Sexual abuse
Emotional neglect
Physical neglect
Divorce / abandoned by parent
Domestic violence
Parental substance abuse
Parental mental illness
Family member went to prison
 
California initiated the program in 2020 with the ACEs Aware initiative, a first-in-the-nation attempt to pay primary care providers to screen for the 10 ACE events in children and adults. At the time, Nadine Burke Harris set a goal to reduce ACEs and toxic stress by half in one generation [3]. Their February 2024 update boasted that over 1.5 million individuals had been screened for ACEs from January 1, 2020 to October 31, 2023. The report also asserted that the program made a difference in clinical care but did not report any details [4].
 
The next phase of the program is the $24 million Live Beyond initiative, which is principally a public relations campaign aimed at 16-25 year-olds. By providing an informational website, social content on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and inspirational stories of healing, the Live Beyond campaign hopes to prevent future ACEs.
 
Analysis
The California ACE campaign is based on the premise that you can prevent stress life events by handing out a screen at a doctor visit. One of the co-authors of the 1998 study, Robert Anda, and others, however, voiced their opposition and warned against screening [5].
 
It is implausible to believe that giving a screen, which may or may not be followed by brief counsel from a doctor about community resources, can prevent ACEs. If it were that simple, complex societal problems would have been shrunk a long time ago.
 
The underlying premise of ACEs is flawed because the studies are flawed. They are cross-sectional and have zero ability to explain causal relationships. Rather than ACEs causing physical diseases, it is more plausible that family settings where ACEs are more likely to happen are the same family settings where worse physical health outcomes are likely to happen. Neither one causes the other. They co-occur in families because bad things in life do not usually happen at random due to complex genetic and heritable reasons.
 
ACE advocates claim that their science cannot be challenged because it is based on a scientific consensus. The problem with that claim is that the field of scholars in academia has become over the past sixty years a self-selected group who are highly skewed toward progressive leftist ideology [6]. The skew is probably even more prominent in leaders of national organizations that produce the consensus statements.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The likely true purpose of the campaign is to maintain and tighten control of a public narrative supporting the ideology that humans are highly malleable and children are highly fragile. Hence, rather than promoting nuclear families and self-reliance, the ACE narrative is important for supporting progressive leftist government entitlement programs—under the guise of public health— to supposedly make the world a better place.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Vincent J. Felitti et al. "Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study," American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14 (1998): 245-258.
[2] Live Beyond website. Accessed May 30, 2024. https://livebeyondca.org/parents-caregivers/
[3] Press release, December 9, 2020. Office of the California Surgeon General. https://osg.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/266/2020/12/PRESS-RELEASE_SG-REPORT_ACES_TOXIC-STRESS_12092020.pdf
[4] Quarterly Progress Update, February 2024. Office of the California Surgeon General. https://www.acesaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ADA_Feb_2024_Quarterly_Progress_Report_01172024.pdf
[5] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009
John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708
[6] Mitchell Langbert (2018). Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty. Academic Questions 31:186-197. doi 10.1007/s12129-018-9700-x
 
 
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Source: Center on the Developing Child newsletter, April 3, 2024
Read time: 3 minutes 
 
This Happened
On April 3, 2024, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University announced that Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D., has decided to step down at the end of June after 18 years as Center Director.
 
Who is Jack Shonkoff?
Shonkoff’s most well-known contribution is coining and then disseminating the concept of “toxic stress,” which has been cited over 20,000 times in science articles, many more times in the media, and helped to transform the ideological debate on how to raise children. He is a pediatrician who focused most of his academic career on advocacy and social policy. He has been first or secondary author on over 50 journal publications, most of them commentaries or policy recommendations, and over 30 book chapters. He has had prominent roles in national organizations and testified to Congress about the well-being of children.
 
The Premise
Shonkoff’s advocacy has had an extraordinary influence on the field of pediatrics and shaping public perception by setting an intellectual narrative that children are far more fragile than previously thought and society must protect them from stress and adverse experiences.
 
In 1998-2000, he chaired a committee of experts on child development who published a policy monograph for the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that child development is derailed on a massive level by environmental stressors, and for the first time created the concept of “stressors that are toxic” [1].
 
Next, in 2003, while at Brandeis University, Shonkoff spearheaded the creation of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, which, despite the name was not a national government agency; the council was simply a private group of like-minded scholars with a stated mission to transform social policy. Their aim was to change the care of very young children from “a private, family matter” to influence national policy about children based on new neuroscience [2].
 
Then, in 2006, Shonkoff moved to Harvard University and became the founding director of the Center on the Developing Child. By then, the Council, which followed Shonkoff to Harvard, was worried that “just saying ‘stress’ more loudly wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go” [2]. The Council agreed to invent and disseminate the phrase “toxic stress.” Further, to convey their message more clearly to the public, they also invented a hierarchical taxonomy of positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. With a few years, their efforts made toxic stress widely accepted.
 
Prior to Shonkoff’s advocacy, there had never appeared a cogent connection between childhood psychological stress and derailed child development; the concept of stressors that are toxic had been used only to describe animals, mostly fish and shrimp, poisoned by pollutants. His synthesis appeared to be a stunning connection of psychological stress to major adult disease and dysfunction.
 
The concept of toxic stress is nearly identical to, and borrows heavily from, the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) movement, which claims, based on weak, cross-sectional studies, that stress and trauma in childhood permanently damages brains and causes a wide range of serious medical illnesses. The concept is also nearly identical to the claims in the 2014 best-selling book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.
 
Analysis
The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
 
Shonkoff was a master at pulling together cherry-picked research through a wordsmith’s skill with academic rhetoric and humanitarian sentiment to convince others that he had finally found the source of nearly all childhood suffering. Toxic stress would have been a useful theory to provide levers for policy makers to pull to raise children out of chronic misery.
 
None of it, however, is true.
 
The supporters of toxic stress and ACE push back on any criticism by asserting that there is a widespread consensus and the scientific debate is over. As Shonkoff wrote in 2000, “The scientific evidence on the significant developmental impacts of early experiences, caregiving relationships, and environmental threats is incontrovertible…The overarching question of whether we can intervene successfully in young children’s lives has been answered in the affirmative and should be put to rest” [1].
 
Shonkoff omitted, however, or perhaps didn’t realize given his limited experience as a researcher, that the ACE research upon which he heavily leaned, is one-hundred percent cross-sectional in nature, which has zero power to provide causal conclusions. When individuals have been studied prospectively with assessments gathered before trauma and repeated after trauma, most studies fail to support toxic stress, and the few that do have been unreplicable [3]. A mechanism for how ACEs can cause a massive array of both mental and physical dysfunctions from psychological stress, including many that are normal, everyday stressors, has never been found.
 
What’s Next?
At age of approximately 78, it’s not clear what’s next for Shonkoff. The announcement stated that he plans “to dedicate all his time to an external, field facing agenda. Jack is not retiring…He will focus his time and energy on engaging directly with policymakers and community-based leaders who are eager to leverage scientific insights…”
 
Whether he has scientific insights is arguable. It is conceivable that his legacy will instead be a doctor who was gripped by a progressive leftist ideology that children are fragile and then found studies that fit while ignoring better science. Toxic stress is not a scientific term. It is a marketing slogan.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. "From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development," National Academy Press, (2000).
[2] 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).
[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.
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.
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).
 
​
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Source: Hartford HealthCare press release
Read time: 2.7 minutes plus short video
 
This Happened
Claiming to be the first of its kind, on April 23, 2024, Hartford HealthCare (Connecticut) announced the opening of its Center for Research in Racial Trauma and Community Healing.
 
Who Did This?
The center’s founder is child and adolescent psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera, MD, PhD, who is the chair of psychiatry at the Institute of Living at Hartford HealthCare. His publications focus on recognizing bias, stigma, and microaggressions in health care settings. He is a past Diversity Leadership Fellow with the American Psychiatric Association. Serving on the Police Services Board for the London, Ontario police force from 2018-2021, he led the Board’s anti-racism efforts and trauma-informed policy reform.
He and collaborators have created “transformative learning theory” as a model for inserting implicit bias training into the education of health professionals [1].
The Hartford HealthCare system also houses a Center for Equity with progressive views that it is wrong to misgender someone and that puberty blockers have saved lives of transgender children by preventing suicide.
 
The Premise
Current projects already underway at the Center of Racial Trauma include:
1. A culturally affirming parent support group for Black and African American parents.
2. A study of mistrust and discrimination in reproductive care in partnership with UConn Health.
3. Tapping artificial intelligence to analyze stigmatizing and biased language in electronic health records in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
The Center’s future mission, according to its website, is to provide (1) Research on how racial trauma affects individuals and communities, (2) Education to train mental health professionals, improve equity, and reduce bias, and (3) Community Engagement through youth programs, mentorship, and mental health services.
 
The Center’s staff consists of the chair of psychiatry (Sukhera) and one research associate with a master’s degree in health administration.
They did not state what outcomes would be measured to gauge the success of the Institute.
They did not announce new projects, training programs, or services.
 
Analysis
If the intent is better care, there is no prior empirical evidence that it can create better outcomes of care, as this center is the first of its kind. Since Dr. Sukhera has never received NIH research funding and has never first-authored a controlled research experiment, it is not clear who is going to conduct the research to produce better outcomes.
If the intent is education for the community, the terminology may lead to confusion. Despite the attention-grabbing assertion that “racial trauma” exists, this construct is not trauma by the traditional definition used in psychiatry. Traumatic experiences are defined as life-threatening, and they are typically sudden, unexpected discrete events that create a sense of fear and panic. In contrast, racial trauma seems synonymous with racial discrimination, which are chronic experiences that are either known and expected or covert.
Racial trauma is one of a host of non-life-threatening stressors that scholar activists have been trying to elevate into traumas for ideological motivations. Others include historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, climate trauma, complex trauma, developmental trauma, and a dozen or more experiences from the adverse childhood experiences studies.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The main driving force seems to be the arrival of Dr. Sukhera in 2021, who describes himself a “scholar activist” [2}. He appears to be one of the breed of medical professionals and academic professors who have shed most pretense of equipoise and aggressively advocate for progressive leftist causes under the guise of extraordinary caring.
 
In this short video of him discussing the new center, he describes that the new center will acknowledge the pain of racial trauma and that it is real. Besides acknowledging, however, it’s still a bit vague what the center will do [3].

Dr. Sukhera’s posts on X (formerly Twitter), interviews, and articles provide steady representations of the progressive liberal ideology including DEI, gender-affirming care, gun control, implicit bias, and a belief that medicine is systemically racist. His social media posts emphasize how deeply he feels human suffering. In a post from 3/9/2023, he thinks people who want to ban gender affirming care are deliberately cruel (3/9/23). In another from 11/7/2023: “If you hurt I hurt. If you’re afraid—I am here to have your back…We must be hypervigilant in protection of one another’s safety.”
 
If the intent is something besides legitimate hopes for better care or accurate education, this type of strategy has been seen before. Communities have tried to leverage racial sensitivity before to alleviate racial tensions, prevent crime, and provide the appearance that something significant is being done. Philadelphia initiated a transformation of the city’s mental health services into a trauma-informed system in 2005 to address high unemployment and murder rates. Baltimore responded to riots in 2015 with a trauma-informed series of transformations for mental health services [4]. Violent crime in both cities remain well above the national average, and crime in general has increased.
 

REFERENCES
[1] Sukhera, Javeed; Watling, Christopher J.; and Gonzalez, Cristina M., "Implicit Bias in Health Professions: From Recognition to Transformation" (2020). Paediatrics Publications. 2052. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/paedpub/2052
[2] Conversations on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with the Medical Director Institute (March 31, 2023). National Council for Mental Wellbeing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljmTU7Lt90M
[3] News 8 WTNH.com (April 23, 2024). https://www.wtnh.com/news/health/hartford-healthcare-launches-new-research-center-that-focuses-on-racial-trauma/
[4] The genesis of both city efforts described in Michael S. Scheeringa (2021), The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts.

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written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 4.1 minutes
 
Some of the culture war conflicts go by different names but they are about the same thing at the underlying core: What is the cause of human nature?

Environment—or culture or life experiences—is the answer for Marxism, hence Communism, and today’s cultural Marxism movements. According to these theories, human nature is highly malleable. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Environment—in the form of oppression—deforms human character and suffocated the success one can achieve personally and economically. In Marxism, capitalism is the oppressor which destroys workers’ characters and robs them of their full potential as creative, utopian beings. In critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, racism is the oppressor; race is considered a social construct for which there is no biological basis. In queer theory and transgender advocacy, a heterosexual norm is the oppressor; gender is not a biological reality.

​Biology—or genes or heredity—is the answer for much of conservative thinking. Races are real entities wherein the differences driven by biology can extend beyond superficial skin color. Sex is determined by genes at conception. The belief in a fixed conception of human nature is captured in the Declaration of Independence which begins by famously proclaiming that humans have inalienable, i.e., unchanging, rights.
 
Book Summary
Carl Degler’s 1991 book, In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, has a simple premise: Trace the history of the debate about the cause of human nature—culture versus biology, nurture versus nature—in terms of how the pendulum of consensus in the social sciences has swung back and forth. The shifts of the consensus revealed that the goal for many social scientists who advocated for environment was never to arrive at true facts. The goal was to arrive at the most useful beliefs.
The first part of the book begins in the mid-nineteenth century when biology was thought to play a strong role in determining human nature. Most people still lived close to the land, were intimately familiar with other species on farms, and witnessed their frequent breeding cycles. Mendel’s discoveries in genetic inheritance were not yet widely known, but the gist of inheritance of characteristics from parent to progeny seemed obvious. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 set a huge piece of the intellectual framework confirming a role for biology.
But a countervailing framework of environment ascended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as new professions of social science arose. Anthropology, sociology, and psychology provided professional homes for self-selected individuals who, driven by ideological commitments to equality, and passions to better the human race, ejected the role of biology because it didn’t fit with a fast agenda to topple oppressors, lift up the oppressed, and change the world. By 1915, biology had been almost totally discredited by these academics.
 
The second part of the book explained how a revival of biological explanations began in the late 1940s and continued to a point in 1975 when a book like Sociobiology, by E.O. Wilson could be published. This happened due in parts to renewed recognition of Darwinism, new discoveries in genes, new knowledge about animal behavior (e.g., Jane Goodall and chimpanzees; Konrad Lorenz and imprinting), and tests of intelligence in massive samples.
 
I’ve left out huge chunks of the book on fascinating topics, such as social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and the roles of many famous scientists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner, and the contributions of dozens of lesser knowns.
 
Degler didn’t take a clear stand on which cause he believed. He did, however, prominently note the ideological motivations of those who advocated for environment. They came in with ideology predetermined and then created the facts for it. He also noted how environmentalists were successful in creating a hostile atmosphere to the truth and made it taboo to consider certain hypotheses and facts.
 
Who Wrote This?
Carl N. Degler taught history at Vassar College from 1962 to 1968 and at Stanford University from 1968 to 1990. His legacy has been described as illuminating the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups, including African Americans and women [1]. Degler was known as a founding feminist and was one of the first male historians to write a history of women with his 1981 book, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Neither Black Nor White about slavery and race relations. Following the publication of In Search of Human Nature, he unsurprisingly encountered some resistance from social scientists who favored environment. Degler died in 2015 at the age of 93. 

Analysis
Degler’s book was published before the dominant resurgence in the past twenty years of the modern cultural Marxism movements. This includes the trauma field, where the pendulum has swung back far to the environmentalists’ side. If a more sensible discourse is to be achieved, this underlying misconception of human nature needs to be acknowledged and attacked.
 
Degler’s book never touched on trauma. The book was published in 1991, and the trauma advocacy movements did not hit a stride until around 2000. Degler’s narrative, however, is appropriate. The various trauma advocacy movements—ACEs, toxic stress, complex PTSD, and trauma-informed care—and all the pseudoscientific fabricated traumas—developmental, complex, historical, racial, intergenerational, and climate—are based on the same premise as Marxism that human nature is highly malleable.
 
The pushback against the trauma advocacy movements has been slow, as it must be. Whereas it is easy to publish commentaries, books, and convenience research of unverified assertions that elevate trauma to the role of causing all that is wrong with society, it takes a long time to design, fund, conduct, and publish good research that answers complex questions. There are now substantial amounts of good research showing that the assertions of the trauma advocacy movements are just that—unverified and discredited assertions.
 
Overall, Degler’s book is worthy for documenting the history of one of the important paths that has led to the current eruptions of ideology in Western societies. The legitimacy of these movements is contingent on the denial of the biological basis of human nature. Degler’s contribution was to show how the tides in belief have shifted over time, how the social sciences can be easily corrupted, and the constant battle that seems will always be between ideology and truth.
 
Degler nudged up to a deeper question but never answered it. He asked several times why beliefs in environment found such friendly lodging in the minds of many social scientists when evidence of biology was before them. Yes, they acted on humanitarian impulses to make the world better, but why were those impulses so strong in certain individuals and not in others? Degler was a historian whose skill set was more to explain what happened, not the psychology of why. In my book, The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts, I offered an explanation based on fundamentally different moral foundations of liberals versus conservatives.
 
 
References
[1] Emily  Langer (January 9, 2015), Carl N. Degler, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of marginalized groups, dies at 93, The Washington Post. Accessed 5/20/2024)
 
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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 stem 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.

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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.


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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.
 
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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.

Source: New York Post
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
Update July 16, 2024: Sen. Menendez was found guilty of all 16 counts.

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.

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.
 
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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.

​When showing models in this manner to legislators, it can easily be misleading:

• The legislators were not told that this model assumes it is just as easy to add the second 1% as it is to add the first 1%.
• Legislators were not told that desirable housing stock to own might not be available.
• There was no consideration of how real estate markets react to an influx of more buyers (i.e., prices go up) and how that would impact the program.
• Legislators were not told that the model seems to assume that renters with insufficient funds to buy a house often also may have insufficient funds to sustain homeownership that requires property taxes, major repairs, and insurance.
• Population health was never defined.
• It was not explained how home ownership leads to improved health.
• Incredible gains were demonstrated in line graphs but the software does not track the amount of funds invested or future cost savings.
• There was no consideration about whether families versus non-families or if young versus old renters behave differently, or dozens of other variables that could impact rental and housing markets.

 
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.
 

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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.