Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
Scholars and activists have never tried to argue for trauma-informed reforms based on empirical evidence, because there is none (see here). Instead, from its inception in 2001 to the geometric growth in publications today, it has always been advocated on qualitative grounds as morally good. But who selected the moral concerns and how were they defined?
 
Who Did This?
The trauma-informed concept was invented in 2001 by two clinician activists Maxine Harris, PhD and Roger Fallot, PhD. Since then, it has been leveraged by thousands of scholars from a wide range of disciplines.
 
The Premise
According to Harris and Fallot, systems that serve trauma survivors can cause “inadvertent retraumatization” by insensitivity [1]. Individuals who experienced trauma are portrayed as permanent victims who are at the mercy of being bombarded by environmental sensations, and interpersonal behaviors that can trigger them at any moment into fear and dysfunction. It is implied that preventing their distress is morally right.
One of their hypothetical examples was a woman who had suffered domestic violence and was seeking help for her drinking problem. She felt the attitude of staff at the addiction center was confrontational, which made her feel ashamed and frightened, so she dropped out. The solution is that staff have an obligation to treat her more gently even if it violates the staff’s empirical expertise and business model, or creates unequal treatment for other patients.
Harris and Fallot did not use the term morals, likely because they were trying to disguise their agenda in the science language of trauma.
 
In Harris and Fallot’s multiple hypothetical examples, nothing illegal or unprofessional happened. 

Analysis
Ever since Socrates, Western philosophers have written about the morals involved in how society ought to balance needs of human groups against personal freedoms. A recent iteration is “moral foundations theory” formulated to describe the evolved, innate virtues that guide human behavior. Morality is a range of different moral concerns consisting of five main foundations: care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, purity/sanctity, and ingroup/loyalty [2].
 
Trauma-informed theory is built on only one foundation of care/harm. Caring for the disadvantaged and oppressed eclipses all other moral foundations. The unspoken aspect of trauma-informed care is that it creates a class of people who are deemed emotionally and cognitively disabled. When considering other classes of people who have problems, none of them are deemed to be so fragile. For example, individuals with cancer are not considered emotionally disabled as they face death. Receptionists have never been mandated to take a special training workshop on how to coddle cancer patients.
 
Why Did This Happen?
In the book The Trouble With Trauma, I described that a large proportion of humans think in fundamentally different ways by being hyper-focused on the care/harm foundation. It starts with the normal search for self-inflation through satisfying a moral concern. In a subset of individuals, this search veers off course when propelled by skewed moral foundations of unbalanced caring for the disadvantaged. This skewness dictates warped views of human nature as highly fragile and necessitates the trampling of the other moral foundations. Yearning for justification of their moral focus, it becomes a mission path guided by heuristics in which their minds “must find something for which to battle” no matter how untrue.
 

References
[1] Harris M, Fallot RD (2001). Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions in Mental Health Services 89, Spring:3-22.
[2] Haidt J, Graham J (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20:98-116.

Source: CorrectionalNews
Read time: 2.1 minutes plus 69-second video
 
This Happened
In May 2025, Racine County, Wisconsin opened its new trauma-informed youth detention center that is being promoted as being so therapeutic that the need for detentions will decrease to zero in the future.
 
Who Did This?
The new center was the vision of the elected head of Racine County government, Jonathan Delagrave. The project broke ground in 2023. Delagrave died unexpectedly in 2024 at age 51 while jogging, and the center has been named after him. Racine County went Republican in the last three presidential elections.
Assisting with the design of the facility was a national firm called Treanor. Andy Pitts, Justice Design Principal with Treanor, stated that when a trauma-informed environment is designed with “care, intention and purpose” it can “transform” troubled youths.
 
The Premise
The trauma-informed architecture of the new center is believed to provide rehabilitation through unconscious environmental influences. As opposed to the windowless and uninviting look of traditional detention centers, the revolutionary architecture uses softer “design techniques to support occupants’ healing and resilience” capable of reversing their criminal behaviors, including:

• Large glass-enclosed entrance lobby
• Warm, wood-ceilinged entryway
• Cross-laminated timber
• Window views to the surrounding rural Wisconsin landscape
• Teaching garden
• Circular courtroom makes all parties feel involved
• Color-changing LED lights shift in color temperature throughout the day in response to youths’ psychological needs

                                                                                                                                        
In the video below, showing excerpts from a local new report [Fox6 News Milwaukee], note the use of natural lighting, soft wood, and warm colors:

Project leaders reportedly claim that this facility will, by itself, somehow move the county to zero-detentions in the future.
 
Analysis
The premise of trauma-informed architecture is that environmental influences can penetrate unconsciously into minds and shift morals and behaviors in a positive direction. This, however, seems unlikely in the type of violent and repeat-offender population that ends up in detention centers.

 If it were that simple to mold human behavior, there would be little predictably to child development and human nature would be wildly erratic and dysfunctional.
 
The trauma-informed concept was created as a political philosophy by activist clinicians untethered from any base of evidence from empirical experience, case reports, or research studies (see here], and hence, has never held itself to a requirement that it has been proven to work. Despite the lack of empiricism, or perhaps because of it, the concept has gained wide traction among neo-Marxist progressives in education, courts, child welfare, mental health clinics, social service agencies, and the social sciences.

Source: Oprah Daily
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On February 5, 2025, Oprah Daily posted an online story by a writer who attended a six-day retreat, titled The Wisdom of Trauma Healing Immersion, which happened in October 2024 in the Berkshire Mountains with over 300 attendees.
 
Who Did This?
The retreat promised to facilitate healing from trauma with body-based approaches with four superstars of the trauma world. The writer described it as, “Picture a week with Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Billie Eilish, with Charli XCX as your host.”
Gabor Maté is a family practice physician who has never published a research article on any psychological topic, yet has curated a global reputation as a trauma expert through four popular books and speaking engagements (see here).
Peter Levine is a psychologist who has no peer-reviewed papers on trauma or PTSD. His world-renown stems from inventing the “somatic experiencing” technique, workshops, and best-selling books.
Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist who has published many peer-reviewed studies on trauma and PTSD. He is famous for his book, The Body Keeps the Score, despite the extensive evidence against his extraordinary claim that trauma embeds itself in the body (see here).
Scott Lyons, whom I had never heard of before, is a “licensed holistic psychologist” who has no peer-reviewed publications. His status stems from developing his trademarked “somatic stress release” program, online and in-person workshops, a book, and a podcast.
 
The Premise
Writer Kira von Eichel attended the retreat in need of help. She described herself as having problematic traits since three years of age. She “vacillated between screaming meltdowns and a state of dissociation wherein mind and body separated totally,” hallucinating about bobbing in an endless ocean, and head-banging on walls. None of these were attributed to trauma. She hinted at trauma, however, saying her mother’s adopted brother “was bad news for me,” but opted not to explain why. As an adult, von Eichel’s main problems are “I really cannot be alone, and I really like detailed instructions to things ahead of time.”
 
Analysis
Von Eichel’s insights included that Peter Levine is the “kindly grandfather.” He creates joy and calm in participants with his “trademark roar, a deep, vibrating VOO sound.” Gabor Maté is “Loki, the Norse god of mischief.” Van der Kolk is “a jolly Santa Claus.” Von Eichel found it noteworthy that all three took off their shoes. Scott Lyons is a “comedian who contorted “his towering, former-dancer’s body on the floor” in a solo, Twister-like game.
When von Eichel asked Maté about her inability to be alone and needing detailed instructions, Maté interpreted this as a trauma response of hypervigilance.

There is a large subset of the population with a sensibility that yearns for a utopian view that personal problems are completely caused by life experiences, and human behavior has no immutable genetic basis. They want to be able to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” There is no good evidence, however, that “the body keeps the score” (see here and here).
 
This arrangement seems like neither grift nor simple incompetence. The trauma gurus seem to believe what they are selling, and, being deceived themselves, are thus well-suited for deceiving others. Consumers seem satisfied—like paying $3,000 for that Swiftian experience was worth it—so, they were not swindled. Instead, it is a window on a large segment of the population that prefers a fabricated view of humanity.

Source: New Directions for Mental Health Services
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
The concept of trauma-informed approaches mushroomed into a dominant movement in academia, politics, courts, and American culture in a span of two decades. It appeared seemingly out of nowhere twenty-four years ago when two activist clinician-scholars published a foundational manifesto.
 
Who Did This?
Maxine Harris, PhD has first- or co-authored over sixty publications, mostly on case management and working with chronically mentally ill individuals, much of it incorporating her vision of trauma-informed services. She has also written eight books, mostly on women’s issues in mental health.
Psychologist Roger D. Fallot, PhD has first- or co-authored over thirty publications, mostly on trauma, and focused on religion and spirituality aspects.
 
The Premise
In 2001, Harris and Fallot edited a special issue of a journal called New Directions for Mental Health Services. It consisted of eight articles that introduced the new trauma-informed concept and examined its application across different service components.
 
The rationale for trauma-informed services was that trauma-victims are stymied from receiving critical social and medical services because either the agencies unwittingly put up terrifying barriers or staff at these agencies unconsciously treat victims insensitively. To rectify this, every agency must undergo a self-review and every staff member—even janitors—must go through training to learn how to accommodate every customer by assuming that every customer has been a trauma victim.

Analysis
A striking aspect of Harris and Fallot’s argument is that there was no empirical base to justify the postulation of this revolutionary change. There were no case reports of individuals missing out on social services because their trauma was not recognized. Harris and Fallot did describe examples of how trauma victims might perceive roadblocks to receiving care, but they were hypothetical. I’ve worked in many mental health settings for three decades looking at how trauma impacts individuals, including five federal research grants, and their examples don’t ring true.
 
There were no surveys of agencies documenting insensitive customer service interactions that uniquely affected trauma survivors. Even if there was some truth to their imaginary examples, there was no evidence on how commonly they happened.
 
Most importantly, there was no consideration for other potential causes of the individuals’ problems.  Take their imaginary example of a man who wants to seek help for anxiety but is too frightened of crowds and buses to attend a clinic. It is far more likely that his ‘fright’ is due to biologically-based personality disorder features that 'trauma-informed scholars' do not believe in. But in the trauma-informed dogma, every problem is explained by a single cause—trauma.
 
Why Did This Happen?
The phrase ‘trauma-informed services’ is a classic example of the attempts to control language and ideas since neo-Marxist revolutionaries shifted strategy from their failed violent revolutions in the 1960s and 1970s to the ‘long march through the institutions.’ The word ‘trauma’ ticks the box of adopting a therapeutic approach rather than the violent rhetoric and behaviors that had alienated the public. The word ‘informed’  has the surface meaning of neutral education but really means education only about the leftist progressive view of human nature as highly fragile and excludes any biological basis for behaviors. The word ‘services,’ or the interchangeable ‘approaches’ or ‘care,’ obfuscates meaning as benevolent assistance, but means in practice something entirely different of installing a different consciousness that cannot truly help anyone.

Source: Psychiatry Research
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
Researchers measured heart rate variability repeatedly in individuals for six months after they experienced traumatic incidents, hoping to identify those with more severe PTSD symptoms at a single time point or to predict those whose symptoms would worsen in the future.
This was an attempt to discover a biomarker, which is a measure of biology that indicates a disease state or tracks with the worsening or improvement of symptoms. An example in medicine is the HbA1c blood test which can predict diabetes.
 
Who Did This?
Lauriane Guichard, MD, is Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She first- or co-authored approximately thirty publications on anesthesia and surgery. This is her only publication on trauma. This publication had 41 co-authors, many of whom have extensively published on trauma and PTSD.
 
The Claim
The motivation for this study was that the researchers believed the post-trauma psychiatric problems of too many people are not being diagnosed and these people are not receiving treatment that could help them. If successful, this would discover biomarkers of psychological problems that would not require self-disclosure.
They recruited 2,032 adults from 27 emergency departments who suffered traumatic events. These were mostly motor vehicle accidents (76%). For six months, subjects wore wrist devices that measured heart rate. They also answered surveys about their symptoms (nightmares, anxiety, sleep difficulty, etc.) on their smartphones at 10 or 11 time points.
 
Researchers conducted a comprehensive and complicated set of statistical tests that involved 10 psychological outcomes, 50 possible biomarker variables, and both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.
Results were less than exciting. When associations were found between heart rate variables and psychological outcomes, they were small, plagued by both many false positives and false negatives, and results often differed between sexes for inexplicable reasons.
Of the 50 possible biomarkers, not one achieved both sensitivity and precision.
The authors concluded, somewhat wistfully, that “these biomarkers might be most useful as a tool to supplement other existing measures such as self-reported symptoms.”
 
Analysis
This study raises two important concerns. First, this study illustrated that efforts to identify biomarkers for PTSD, and probably for any psychiatric syndrome, are of limited utility.

The manifestation of symptoms in psychiatric syndromes are too heterogenous. The underlying neurobiology of symptoms is much more complicated than people know or pretend to know.
 
Second, even if biomarkers could be identified, no one has presented a strong case for how they might be useful. One weak argument has been that identification of a biomarker could lead to prevention before symptoms develop, but there are no known preventable psychiatric syndromes. Another weak argument is that biomarkers could help clinicians track the course of waxing and waning of syndromes, but this is already easily accomplished simply by asking individuals about their symptoms. A final weak argument is that biomarkers could lead to targeted treatment interventions, but there is no known menu of treatment interventions that can narrowly target specific systems.
 
These are well-known and obvious concerns, but you would not know it by reading this study, or by reading almost any study or review of biomarkers. Like much of trauma research, authors in this field are prone to over-interpret their findings and try to deceive themselves and others that we know more than we do.
 
​
References
[1] Schmidt, U., Willmund, G.-D., Holsboer, F., Wotjak, C. T., Gallinat, J., Kowalski, J. T., & Zimmermann, P. (2015). Searching for non-genetic molecular and imaging PTSD risk and resilience markers: Systematic review of literature and design of the German Armed Forces PTSD biomarker study. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 51, 444–458. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.08.020
 
[2] Yang, J.-J., & Jiang, W. (2020). Immune biomarkers alterations in post-traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 268, 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.02.044
 
[3] Sbisa, A. M., Madden, K., Toben, C., McFarlane, A. C., Dell, L., & Lawrence-Wood, E. (2023). Potential peripheral biomarkers associated with the emergence and presence of posttraumatic stress disorder symptomatology: A systematic review. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 147, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105954

Source: Stand Up for Southport
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In February 2025, Merseyside Police announced that more than 1,000 officers and staff had completed trauma-informed training.
 
Who Did This?
The region of Merseyside county in the UK is predominantly liberal. It is governed by a seven-member council, all of whom are members of the leftist Labour Party. Emily Spurrell, the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner, mandated the training.  She was elected to the position in 2021. She is a member of the Labour party and the Co-operative Party which holds some principles of socialism.
Spurrell was briefly infamous in 2022 for calling her police force ‘institutionally racist.’ It is believed that Spurrell was the first police commissioner in the UK to suggest their own force is institutionally racist. 
 
The training was provided by Violence Reduction Partnership, a non-profit org that uses a public health approach based on the trauma-informed and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) doctrines.
 
The Premise
The alleged rationale for the training is that encounters with insensitive police—whether as victims or as perpetrators of crime—can “often exacerbate their existing experiences of trauma” [1]. The main intended outcome of the training is that vulnerable, marginalized groups will trust the police more.
 
The training content covered an overview of trauma and ACEs, their ability to cause offending behaviors and worsen health, and principles of how to perform trauma-informed policing. The training also included a therapy-style reflective practice session for group discussion.
 
The training will eventually be given to all 5,700 officers and staff.
 
Analysis
The training content went far beyond teaching about how true psychological trauma impacts humans. They taught attachment theory—the inborn compulsion for infants to bond with caregivers—which has nothing to do with trauma. They taught false concepts that historical events can have trauma impacts through generations into the present day and that racism is a form of trauma.
 
Trauma-informed trainings have been conducted in hundreds of settings over the past decade even though there is no evidence that these programs achieve their intended outcomes (see here and here and here). The only outcomes measured have been perceptions of participants about whether they learned new knowledge. No studies have attempted to measure outcomes about psychological harm, behavior change, or crime reduction.
 
If there were evidence for these trainings, it is not clear what it would look like. Perpetrators are handled with sensitivity to childhood traumas? Perpetrators feel less threatened by police? Victims feel more emotionally coddled by police? To what end? Does a particular empathic language or calm voice make them any less violent or less victimized? These possible outcomes have been neither well-justified nor tested.
 
Why Is This Happening?

They recast their violent rhetoric with a therapeutic language of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda based on identity, emotion, oppression, and trauma [3].
 
Attacking the police was always a central tenet of this movement. Instead of ‘kill the pigs’ violence of the 1960s, it morphed into ‘defund the police’ chants during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Activists believed they could abolish the police and replace their role of keeping the peace with trauma-informed, gender-affirming, and anti-racist policies.
After the riots, communities that defunded police and adopted leniency toward criminals saw how quickly violence erupted at a record-setting pace.
As the riots again failed to achieve the revolution, it settled into a more systematic long march of trauma-informed trainings through the institutions. Hence, the scaled-back effort is to keep police but turn them into re-educated therapists through trauma-informed ideology trainings.
 
 
References
[1] Wilson C, Butler N, Farrugia AM, Quigg Z (2023 April). Merseyside police trauma-informed training: Impact on trauma-informed knowledge and attitudes. Public Health Institute, Liverpool John Moores University. https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/-/media/phi-reports/pdf/2023-06-merseyside-police-trauma-informed-training-evaluation.pdf
 
[2] Harris, M. and Fallot, R.D. (2001), Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions for Mental Health Services, 2001: 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.23320018903
 
[3] Rufo C (2023). America’s Cultural Revolution. How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Broadside Books: New York

Source: Development and Psychopathology
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In December 2024, a study was published that aimed to show how out-of-home child care could lessen mental health problems of very young children. It didn’t work.
 
Who Did This?
The first author was psychologist Michelle Bosquet Enlow, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. She specializes in infant mental health with a focus on trying to prove that there is an intergenerational impact of parenting on children’s mental health and neurobiology. She has first- or co-authored over thirty publications on this topic.
 
The Claim
As interest in trauma has grown, advocates for early child care have sought to hitch their cart to the trauma wagon by claiming that child care can improve psychological problems. Based on their belief that prior studies had shown cognitive and academic improvements from early child care (which was a cherry-picked misinterpretation), the researchers’ hypothesis for this study was that the more time children spent in early child care, the better would be their general mental health.
They claimed that their hypothesis was likely to be true because child care:

• Can provide stimulating play and quality social interactions
• Can teach strategies to cope with adversity and build self-regulation
• Offers a supportive environment which is lacking at home
• Has emotionally responsive educators

 
They analyzed data from 2,204 children in the 3- to 5-year age range who had been in child care for an average of 26 hours per week. They were forty-nine percent Black and thirty-seven percent White.
 
The results found no effect for their hypothesis. The amount of time spent in child care had zero impact on both internalizing and externalizing problems. Results were the same for private care or center-based care.
 
Analysis
The study likely failed because it was based on the premise that psychiatric problems are environmentally caused. Since it is far more likely that psychiatric problems are largely genetically-based, there was no good reason to think nurture could reverse them.

​In the discussion section of their paper, Enlow and colleagues, however, never considered the possibility for a biological basis of behavior. In fact, they doubled-down on their nurture theory by speculating that the risks these children face are “chronic or fixed” beyond age 3 years, and they need extra support during their entire childhoods.
 
Then they triple-downed by concluding the paper with an inexplicable call for future research because “Evidence that childcare can protect or optimize child mental health would support federal and state policies to expand availability of quality childcare.”
 
This study is the extension of the liberal argument that institutions such as child care, as opposed to home care by poor and often single mothers, can better provide for the emotional care of children.

Head Start was launched in 1965—with no evidence it could work—for three- and four-year-olds. It originally focused on school readiness and raising IQ, but, after dismal results, shifted to social competence goals. Early Head Start was launched in 1995 to extend this model to ages zero to three. Multiple reviews have shown the lack of effectiveness of these programs, while proponents are able only to point to weak effects inconsistently across studies [1].
It’s clear, at least from this study, that the child care advocates continue to oversell their product.

References
[1] Bailey DB, Bruer JT, Symons FJ, Lichtman JW (editors) (2001). Critical Thinking About Critical Periods. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.: Baltimore.

Source: Indiana House Democratic Caucus press release and The Statehouse File.com
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In January 2025, two bills were introduced in the current session of the Indiana state legislature attempting to mandate trauma-informed practices state-wide.
 
Who Is Doing This?
Vanessa Summers, author of House bill 1241, is the Democrat representative of District 99, a northwest section of Indianapolis. She also authored a failed resolution shortly after Trump’s inauguration stating that the General Assembly affirms its commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She claimed “Whereas, The American Dream belongs to all of us, not just 13 billionaires and multi-millionaires.”
 
Michael Crider and Ed Charbonneau, authors of Senate bill 181, are Republican senators of Greenfield and Valparaiso respectively.
 
The Premise
House Bill 1241 proposed to create a trauma-informed care commission that would meet to “identify, evaluate, and make recommendations regarding best practices and research models with respect to children, youth, and families who have experienced trauma." The bill emphasized focusing on how to implement practices in educational settings.
On February 20, the bill passed the House of Representatives 71-15 and headed to the Senate for consideration.
 
Senate Bill 181 proposed to require trauma-informed care training as part of the curriculum for nursing education programs. On March 11, it failed to pass out of committee primarily because the head of the state nurse’s association refused to support a bill that would be the first to target a specific piece of psychology within nursing. 
 
Analysis
The failure of Senate Bill 181 is heartening and was expected in a conservative state like Indiana. The head of the nursing association noted that there are dozens of psychological issues that could be added to nursing training and there is no good justification for making a special case for the so-called “trauma-informed” agenda.
 
The objective of the other bill—House Bill 1241—for creating a commission is nearly always the first step in the strategy to embed an intellectual framework into the over-expanded bureaucratic state. After a year of “study” on a pre-ordained conclusion, new programs would be recommended, launched on small budgets, and then become cemented in the deep state as rights for a special interest group that never had positive rights before. This raises several additional concerns.

​These types of events are always sudden, unexpected, and create a moment of terror for one’s life. The language of the bill, however, made it clear that it was aimed at adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), most of which are ordinary daily stressors and are not life-threatening.
Conflating stress with trauma is deliberate obfuscation by ACE activists to deceive people to think life stress is exceedingly harmful as part of the Leftist progressive worldview that humans are incredibly fragile.

Second, the directive for the proposed commission included to summarize the evidence on how to prevent trauma. This is an unrealistic utopian dream. There are no known proven strategies on how to prevent stress or trauma beyond the many existing laws and the safety that comes with living in stable two-parent families.

Third, the bill demanded creation of a state-wide screening program for stress experiences similar to the failed California ACEs Aware campaign. This type of screening effort has been repeatedly criticized as misguided and harmful (see here and here).

Fourth, the bill directed the commission to focus on educational settings. This represents the playbook—which many parents across America have revolted against—of psychological programs being targeted at the nation’s children, such as critical race theory, DEI, transgender, and social sensitivity programming.
 
Why Is This Happening?
This represents another of the many attempts at the city and state levels by neo-Marxist activists to capture our public institutions from within. Rather than marching in the streets like the 1960s, they have been successful at driving cultural change through bureaucratic reforms.
The fact that Republicans are sometimes associated with efforts shows how they have been duped by the Leftist’s strategy which is careful to code their message in academic-speak: Marx’s theory of universal oppression is replaced with “adverse childhood experiences,” and total transformation of culture is replaced with “trauma-informed care.” Their true object is not the pursuit of evidence-based interventions to help children flourish, but the pursuit of cultural revolution.
 
References
[1] Kilpatrick DG, Resnick HS, Acierno R (2009).  Should PTSD Criterion A be retained? Journal of Traumatic Stress.  22(5):374-83, 2009 Oct.

Source: International Psychogeriatrics. The paper is free open access.
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In January 2025, a study was published claiming that an eight-factor model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms was the best statistical fit. This is representative of the problem inherent in factor analysis studies that have promoted a false view of human nature that the post-trauma responses can be distilled into a single structure.
 
Who Did This?
The first author was psychologist Joan M. Cook, Ph.D., Professor in the Yale School of Medicine. She has over 150 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of traumatic stress, geriatric mental health and implementation science. She frequently writes op-eds in popular media outlets bashing Trump, pathologizing Trump supporters, and advocating for gun control, the myth that trauma damages brains, climate catastrophe, the fallacy of ACEs, Black Lives Matter, and the view that America is systemically racist.
 
The Claim
Believing that the assessment of PTSD in older adults was under-studied (it’s not), the researchers’ aim was to examine how older adults’ reported their PTSD symptoms. They recruited military veterans 60 years or older, of whom 3,001 self-reported their PTSD symptoms and other problems. One of the study’s main tests was to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis to compare models restricted to one, four, six, seven, and eight factors.  They concluded that the eight-factor model provided the best statistical fit.
The authors concluded that their findings have paved the road for future research that can lead to better diagnosing of PTSD and more targeted treatments despite providing no evidence themselves of real-life benefits.
 
Analysis
This study is one of over six hundred studies over the past four decades using some version of the obtuse factor analysis statistical technique with PTSD symptoms. More background on this useless exercise can be found here and here.
The many problems with the factor analysis technique include that it possesses an unearned aura of importance. Despite massively inconsistent and un-replicated results in the past (see here), the body of factor analysis literature was used in the 2013 DSM-5 revision to change the diagnostic algorithm needlessly from three to four clusters of symptoms.
The premise of factor analysis is the theory that there exists a latent model of PTSD that cannot be observed by the efforts of the human mind. Being a latent, i.e., unobservable model, it is inherently unprovable and whether the latent model exists is a theoretical question not a verifiable proposition.
Of most immediate concern for the useless Cook et al. study is the undisputed fact that whenever models are compared to each other, the model with the most factors obtains the best statistical fit nearly 90% of the time due simply to how mathematical variance is accounted for. A ridiculous eight-factor model is the most any researcher has been willing to conjure so far, but inevitably when someone creates a nine-factor model, that will be best-fitting.
 
Why Did This Happen?
It can be difficult to see in a brief blog post, but this type of psychiatric research is one small part of the liberal progressive false worldview that human nature can be finitely understood by abstract reasoning and controlled by revolutions of cherry-picked “science.” While PTSD is a well-validated discrete syndrome, it is also true that the manifestations of PTSD symptoms are enormously heterogenous between individuals. It is ludicrous to believe that one factor structure can or should be superior to others and would possess unique explanatory powers.

This sort of publication is the real travesty of the peer review system, not the so-called replicability crisis or researchers faking data. (I nevertheless strongly support the current peer review system because all alternatives are worse.) Studies like this get published because peer reviewers have a vested interest in keeping the factor analysis grift going for themselves, or they are ideological academic researchers who have a disinterest in studies that benefit real humans in clinical practice. 

written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.9 minutes
 
Why would suggesting that human behavior is shaped by nature, not nurture, be so threatening? The liberal hegemony in academia which finds this threatening is the result of a long period of gaining control of academia in what has often been called “the long march through the institutions.” This book includes a look back at the early period of the march.
 
Book Summary
Society accords resources to and value for scientists, and  in return scientists produce truths about the natural world for the rest of us. Naturalist (1994) is an autobiography of a scientist who stuck to that deal, no matter where the data took him. Beginning with his boyhood in Alabama and following his rise to become one of our great biologists, it is an appealing “inside story” of a science profession in America.
For the purposes of Trauma Dispatch, I deal with only a small episode in Wilson’s story when he broke a taboo and then his neo-Marxist colleagues tried to destroy him. Everything about this historical episode is relevant to the modern troubles with trauma science.
 
In 1975, Wilson published Sociobiology in which he used evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of social insects and other animals. Wilson argued that all animal behavior is the product of heredity governed by laws of evolution through natural selection. This theory was groundbreaking, influential, and established sociobiology as a new scientific field.
Only the twenty-seventh and final chapter was about humans, in which Wilson suggested that the mechanisms he described for insects and animals likewise applied to humans. This would provide a biological basis for our tendency to inherit much of our human nature—traits such as bonding between parents and children, heightened altruism toward close kin, incest avoidance, tribalism, and territorial aggression.
Fifteen individuals in the Boston area formed the Sociobiology Study Group, which was dominated by Marxists scholars from Harvard. Two of the most prominent were Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, close colleagues of Wilson who worked in his department. They met in secret in Lewontin’s office, one floor below Wilson’s office. After three months of “study,” they sent a letter to the New York Review of Books, trying to impugn Wilson. By claiming a hereditary nature for human behavior, Wilson had crossed a red line. They claimed sociobiology was unsupported by evidence and politically dangerous because it seemed to vindicate ruling despots, restrictive immigration, and eugenics of Nazi Germany. The letter made no attempt to correct Wilson’s facts. It was an ethical diatribe, meant to destroy his credibility.
A wave of opposition soon rose among social scientists who published commentaries trying to exempt human behavior from biology. In November 1976, the American Anthropological Association voted on a motion (and failed) to censure sociobiology and ban two symposia from the meeting. On February 15, 1978, Wilson attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science to speak. When his turn to present came, he remained in his chair because of a cast on his right ankle. About eight men and women sprang from their seats and lined up behind the speakers. Several held up anti-sociobiology placards, one included a swastika. As one protester spoke into the hijacked microphone, a woman dumped a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head, and they chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet.” 

Analysis
Lewontin—the main agitator against Wilson—believed in a “Marxist approach to evolutionary biology.” Lewontin yearned for a socialist world, and claimed only antireductionist, nonbourgeois science would attain it. This was not atypical in the academia culture of the 1970s. A reductionism view of evolutionary biology in which behaviors were heritable instincts was not simply a disliked hypothesis, it was a threat to his belief system.
Wilson sees in retrospect that he was desperately naive to be surprised by the attack. At the time, he knew little about Marxism, and paid little attention to the active Left. In the 1970s, most social theorists believed that human nature was built wholly from experience, i.e., nurture. These social theorists favored nurture because it allowed different cultures to have “moral equivalency,” not judged unsatisfactory by Western schemes. The cultures of oppressed peoples were uniquely valued as victims which needed championing.
Wilson learned the hard way that the sociobiology controversy ran deeper than ordinary scholarly discourse. His enemies “had come to the subject with a different agenda from my own. They viewed science not as separate objective knowledge but as part of culture, a social process compounded with political history and class struggle.”

This also made possible the fake complex PTSD disorder which redefines personality disorders as trauma reactions, and the scientifically-bankrupt Adverse Childhood Experiences movement which claims everyday stressors cause some of the most lethal physical diseases.
This is likely a permanent state of these sciences. The trauma field is full of people like Richard Lewontin who view science professions as platforms to defend a worldview. Even the more  sober researchers and clinicians who do not believe in complex PTSD and ACEs still seem to think the ideological context is a trivial matter better not mentioned. They complain, for example, that when I insert motivations of ideology into science debates, it diminishes my scientific argument. I contend they might heed the story of Wilson and Sociobiology because while sober scientists are generally uninterested in ideology, they are outnumbered by neo-Marxists who certainly are.  As I wrote in The Body Does Not Keep the Score, “I suggest that refusing to place the debunking of science claims within the context of ideologies would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight. We are all in an ideology war now, whether you know it or not. You either get out in front of it or get steamrolled.”