Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
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CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS Written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 2.7 minutes Book Summary Abigail Shrier’s 2024 book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, analyzes the so-called youth mental health crisis. Shrier is clear that there isn’t a mental health crisis. Those who believe there is a crisis have conflated two groups of children. One group has “profound mental illness” and are truly impaired in their ability to function; that group has not increased. Her aim is to explain the other group—the non-disordered group—those who don’t belong on medications or in therapy, “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad.” This group has increased and they are miserable. It is not, however, mental illness; "It’s an emotional hypochondriasis and iatrogenesis crisis.” Her book aims to explain how these worriers have been created by the failures of adults. According to Shrier, there is a lot of blame to go around:
Lastly, Shrier offered common-sense solutions that prescribed essentially the opposite of the problems she uncovered, which I will not detail for brevity.
Analysis Overall, the book is excellent because Shrier analyzed a lot of things accurately and she's a good writer. My main criticism is that you can’t fully explain a problem if you just describe behaviors; you need to describe the etiology. Shrier correctly identified part of the etiology (e.g., harmful practices of many groups of adults), but omitted that they are a subset with distinctive motivations. She seemed to miss that the worried, non-disordered children are a subset, too. Most children are not suggestible to lunatic teachers and social media rubbish. For example, Shrier noted in one sentence that liberal females are overrepresented in this unhappy subset of children, but never explained why and never followed up. It’s not clear if Shrier doesn’t believe there is an underlying ideology, or doesn't understand the ideology of these children and of these zealous parents, teachers, and scholars, or if she opted to ignore it because she (or her publisher) believed, probably wisely, more people would read the book if it wasn’t political. Another criticism is that the book could easily be perceived as anti-medication. She talked to two armchair psychologists who would not recommend medications for ADHD, depression, or anxiety, but never asked a psychiatrist’s opinion, who actually has clinical experience with these medications. The practice of trying medications in humans with heterogenous syndrome profiles is more complicated and less nefarious than Shrier presented it. Lastly, her description of parents putting their children in therapy when they don’t need it is not my experience during thirty years of practice in child psychiatry. It’s a high bar for parents to bring their kids to therapy or put their children on medication, and it’s usually done only after years of suffering and trying everything else. I don’t recognize the community Shrier lives in. Maybe it’s because I live in a red state and Shrier lives in California. Again, this reinforces my point that when Shrier describes the problems, she absolutely nails them, but they are applicable only to an ideologically-skewed subset of vulnerable humans. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts for free. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Polar bear from An Inconvenient Truth Read time: 2.0 minutes This Happened Experts, agencies, activists, and politicians claim that climate change constitutes a severe psychological stress that causes mental health disorders. Who Did This? The theory of man-made climate change will create catastrophes has attracted serious scientific attention since the 1960s. This led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 in which 189 countries agreed in principle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. The theory received a burst of popular support in 2006 with Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The Claims The man-made climate change theory hypothesizes that global temperature rise will cause melting of the polar ice caps, higher sea levels, more frequent and more severe hurricanes and tornados, floods, and droughts. Among the many dreadful outcomes was that without ice caps, polar bears would drown and become extinct. An emotional icon from An Inconvenient Truth was the animated image of a polar bear treading water in a nearly empty ocean. Many government agencies and professional organizations embrace the theory that man-made climate change causes mental problems. For example, the Centers for Disease Control asserted there are two main paths: (1) trauma from natural disasters that are becoming more frequent and more severe (2) chronic stress from both reduced access to resources caused by disaster and anxiety about alleged current catastrophes and the possibility of future catastrophes. Representatives of the World Health Organization published a review paper which concluded that climate change is “a most serious threat to the health and well-being of children and adolescents” [1]. They used the term eco-anxiety to describe the chronic stress from worrying about alleged catastrophes. Multiple peer-reviewed literature reviews about the concept of eco-anxiety have concluded that, without doubt, it causes lasting mental health problems for individuals [2]. Analysis Are disasters becoming more frequent or more severe? Trauma from disasters, of course, causes posttraumatic stress disorder in some individuals, but a connection to climate change is only plausible if disasters are increasing. This has been one of the easier claims to debunk because disasters can be counted. Evidence is clear that hurricanes have trended to decrease over the past 100 years [3], severe tornados are less frequent than fifty years ago, and heat waves have declined over the past eighty years [4]. Is eco-anxiety valid as a unique etiology of mental health problems? No. Eco-anxiety exists but so does excessive anxiety about driving over bridges, traffic accidents, body image, germs, and public embarrassment. All of these are common forms of anxiety that fall under a broader umbrella of generalized anxiety disorder. It is likely that if individuals with eco-anxiety did not have climate change to worry about, they would still have many other anxieties. Researchers have made no attempts yet to untangle eco-anxiety from other worries to determine if it is a unique syndrome. Even the literature reviews that embrace the notion of eco-anxiety have noted the flaws of existing studies as nearly all self-report, cross-sectional, and unsophisticated [1,2]. Why Is This Happening? The emotional valence underpinning the need to act with the utmost urgency to reduce fossil fuel use has always been about individual morality. As Gore stated in his documentary, “This is not a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to happen it is deeply unethical.” This moral crisis provides the value proposition as a political tool, and, coupled with anticipatory fear of natural disasters, is largely what creates additional worries in a subset of individuals with pre-existing anxiety problems. REFERENCES [1] Proulx K; Daelmans B; Baltag V; Banati P. Climate change impacts on child and adolescent health and well-being: A narrative review. [Review] Journal of Global Health. 14:04061, 2024 May 24, doi: 10.7189/jogh.14.04061 [2] Coffey Y, Bhullar N, Durkin J, Islam MS, Usher K. Understanding eco-anxiety: A systematic scoping review of current literature and identified knowledge gaps. J Clim Change Health. 2021;3:100047. doi:10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047 Léger-Goodes T, Malboeuf-Hurtubise C, Mastine T, Généreux M, Paradis PO, Camden C. Eco-anxiety in children: A scoping review of the mental health impacts of the awareness of climate change. Front Psychol. 2022;13:872544. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872544 Martin G, Cosma A, Roswell T, Anderson M, Treble M, Leslie K, et al. Measuring negative emotional responses to climate change among young people in survey research: A systematic review. Soc Sci Med. 2023;329:116008. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116008 [3] Nyberg J, Malmgren BA, Winter A, Jury MR, Kilbourne KH, Quinn TM. Low Atlantic hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years. Nature. 2007 Jun 7;447(7145):698-701. doi: 10.1038/nature05895. Vecchi GA, Landsea C, Zhang W, Villarini G, Knutson T. Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century. Nat Commun. 2021 Jul 13;12(1):4054. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24268-5. Yang W, Wallace E, Vecchi GA, Donnelly JP, Emile-Geay J, Hakim GJ, Horowitz LW, Sullivan RM, Tardif R, van Hengstum PJ, Winkler TS. Last millennium hurricane activity linked to endogenous climate variability. Nat Commun. 2024 Jan 27;15(1):816. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45112-6. [4] Wrightstone G (2017). Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know. Silver Crown Productions, LLC: USA Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Jack Shonkoff, M.D., Harvard University Source: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On July 22, 2024, Jack Shonkoff, M.D., founder of the “toxic stress” movement, posted his aims for the next phase. In May 2024, he stepped down as director of the center he founded to assume a new role as Founding Director. Who Did This? Jack Shonkoff is a pediatrician who has run an advocacy center at Harvard University for the past two decades. He has done more than anyone to advance the hypothesis that trauma and stress permanently damage brains and bodies, and to leverage that vision to influence policy. The Claim Shonkoff’s post stated his new goals for advocacy would be directed by a trilogy of three working papers produced by his Harvard-based work group he calls the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child:
To emphasize the major nature of this shift, Shonkoff called the Center’s past agenda Early Childhood Development 1.0 (ECD 1.0), and christened the new agenda ECD 2.0. Analysis The validity of toxic stress is lacking because it is based on weak cross-sectional studies, lacks a feasible mechanism, and stronger prospective, pre-trauma studies consistently fail to support it. Likewise, there is no good evidence that the psychological stress of racial discrimination permanently damages brains or causes physical illnesses [See here and here] Another concern is that Shonkoff blended into these papers an analysis that minorities tend to have more health problems because they tend to live in environments plagued by material hazards (e.g., air pollution and lead), and that this situation was due to discriminatory policies. This, however, is not consistent with the toxic stress theory, because the mechanism of stress is material toxins that would harm any racial group. This contrasts to the theory that racial discrimination is a mechanism of psychological toxin, consistent with the toxic stress theory. Shonkoff made no effort to clarify the difference in mechanisms. When claiming that all your work is “science-based,” confusing two completely different mechanisms is indefensible. The tortured language opens a whole new area of advocacy that has no connection to the original theory of psychological stress. Why Is This Happening? The emphasis on racial discrimination is a sharp turn for the Council’s working paper series. The first fourteen papers, which spanned 2004-2018, never used the words race or racial to refer to stress. The Council’s reason for this sudden shift was just “21st-century science,” as Working Paper 15 reminded readers five times, omitting to mention that studies on racial discrimination stress had existed since the 1980s [1]. It seems curious that Working Paper 15 appeared in the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter riots, when it became commonplace to frame nearly any problem in the U.S. as systemic racism. Like all cultural revolutions that make progressive leftists feel exhilarated and truly alive [2] (e.g., Marxism, communism, the New Deal, the Great Society, man-made climate change, DEI, etc.), conflict, not outcomes, seems to be the point, and so they are eternal, and the revolutions need to be refreshed every now and then. Shonkoff, always a skilled wordsmith, expertly crafted the shift as being driven by new science, but, as usual, he gets the science wrong. If you’re a foot soldier for toxic stress, take note; you’re being handed a new party policy. REFERENCES [1] Barbarin, O. A. (1983). Coping with ecological transitions by Black families: A psychosocial model. Journal of Community Psychology, 11(4), 308–322. doi: 10.1002/1520-0629(198310)11:4<308::AID-JCOP2290110405>3.0.CO;2-Z Jung, H. (1984). Indo-Chinese refugee services in metropolitan Boston: An impressionistic assessment. Asian American Psychological Association Journal, 16–18. [2] Gornick, V (1977). The Romance of American Communism. Verso: London Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Federal bill aims to add trauma-informed practices to Lyndon Johnson’s still-expanding Great Society8/8/2024
CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) Source: Congress.gov Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On July 11, 2024, text became available for bill H.R. 8526 – Trauma-Informed Schools Act of 2024. It was introduced into the House of Representatives on May 23, 2024 and referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Who Did This? Katherine M. Clark is a Democrat representative from Massachusetts. As the minority Whip, she currently is the highest-ranking woman in Congressional leadership. The Premise H.R. 8526 proposes to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to mandate trauma-informed practices in schools. The bill has not moved out of committee. Specifically, it proposes to insert a definition of trauma-informed practices: a “shared understanding among teachers,… school leaders,… and other staff that— ‘‘(i) adverse and potentially traumatic experiences are common among students; (ii) trauma can impact student learning, behavior, and relationships in school.” The bill aims to implement three practices:
The rest of the bill contains details on amending the application process for federal funding. To receive funding, eligible schools (those with a high proportion of at-risk students) must submit applications with implementation plans to local school agencies, who must submit plans to state agencies, who must submit plans to the federal government. Thus, every level of education bureaucracy would include mandates to implement trauma-informed practices. Analysis The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society aimed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice by greatly expanding the federal government’s control of health care, education, and welfare programs. H.R. 8526 continues that progressive leftist tradition by adding trauma as another domain for federal intervention. Consistent with other definitions of trauma-informed practices, the definition in the bill is enormously broad and includes “adverse” experiences that are everyday stresses, not life-threatening trauma. This allows governmental control of language that redefines any perceived inequity in society as a more pernicious threat of psychological harm than it really is. Trauma-informed trainings are not balanced presentations of scientific evidence (see here and here). They are biased to present a liberal theory that human nature is highly malleable via the hypotheses of toxic stress—that trauma permanently damages brains—and the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) literature—that early childhood common stressors cause a huge variety of physical illnesses in adulthood. These hypotheses have been debunked as lacking credible evidence (debunked here and here). The definition of trauma-informed in the bill is revealing for its intent by the bill’s sponsors to primarily create a “shared understanding.” The intent is not to educate educators and students on the research of what we know about human nature and our response to trauma, it is to enthrone a fabricated sense of reality that the science is settled in support of their theory. Implicit bias increased in popularity in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of DEI, with the assertion that Whites were systemically racist even if they didn’t know it. The psychological research trying to establish implicit bias as a real construct, however, has received severe criticisms. Social emotional learning may be considered the child development version of implicit bias. It is promoted as a curriculum for teaching children how to access an emotion vocabulary and develop adaptive social behaviors, but teaches that these are tools for examining root causes of inequity. It has been criticized as a Trojan horse for introducing Critical Theory and a meta-analysis of 90 programs found no evidence of a beneficial effect six months after programs ended [1]. Why Is This Happening? The trauma-informed practices movement has made inroads with courts and local government policies, but it has found the greatest traction in local educational settings [here, here, and here]. This bill represents an attempt to expand a foothold into the federal educational level. The bill is written as an intention to improve child outcomes through science, but there are zero research studies showing that trauma-informed practices improve any outcomes for children. If implemented, the only thing the bill would ultimately achieve is embedding in federal law, with all the infrastructure and funding that entails, the permanent training of educational staff and students in an unproven ideology. REFERENCES [1] Cipriano C, Ha C, Wood M, Sehgal K, Ahmad E, McCarthy MF (2024). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Universal School-Based SEL Programs in the United States: Considerations for Marginalized Students. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 100029, doi: 10.1016/j.sel.2024.100029 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Why is a family practice doctor considered one of the world experts on psychological trauma?8/5/2024
CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE Gabor Maté, M.D. Source: Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta Read time: 2.3 minutes This Happened On July 2, 2024, an interview with Gabor Maté, MD was released on Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN podcast to discuss his views on trauma, happiness, and healing. Who Did This? Gabor Maté was born in Hungary, immigrated to Canada when he was 12, and became a family physician who practiced for many years in Vancouver. He is not trained as a licensed mental health clinician and has not published a research article on any psychological topic. Maté has written four books, three of them best-sellers, and has over 70 hours of videos of his presentations/courses for sale. Now 80 years-old, he is one of the most sought-after trauma experts, with dozens of interviews on the internet, and maintains a busy international speaking schedule. The Claims Maté has made an enormous number of assertions that he claims are settled science over the years. In this 32-minute podcast, he covered a small portion of them, but these include some of his core assertions that reflect his general views:
Analysis All Maté’s claims about trauma and stress are provably wrong. Life-threatening events are not equivalent to little stresses in their psychological impacts. Trauma and stress do not permanently damage brains or bodies (debunked here and here). A mechanism of damage—be it cortisol, immune, or epigenetic changes—has never been remotely proven. Infants do not store implicit memories that shape their behaviors for lifetimes. Society is not the cause of all our stress, as inherited individual differences determine far more about how stress is perceived. In contrast to many psychiatrist and psychologist trauma experts who make the same types of claims, Maté doesn’t even try to verify his claims with original research evidence (a common criticism of his books). His authority comes solely from lived experience and anecdotes. Why Is This Happening? Why he is so popular? Maté’s striking demeanor may have something to do with it. He looks like the personification of ascetic contemplation with deep set eyes, droopy eyelids, unkempt hair, with wrinkled skin on a spindly frame. He has no full smile. His soft utterances seem dense with compassion. The misinformation in his message has much in common with other progressive liberal philosophies that claim to know what’s wrong with societies. These sensibilities believe that the self and society must progress, and can be controlled, and want to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” An expert on perhaps the greatest literary work on oppression and human nature described why he believed Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto maintains such enduring and worldwide appeal: “A manifesto is primarily a performance, which uses language to enact a will to realize a particular future. It aims to orientate the reader towards a specific future. This willfulness manifests itself in a special kind of literary absolutism—the use of the tense of the absolute present—in which what is desired is presented as if it were already the case, in order that it might become so” [1]. In the case of Maté, it is a performance to convince the world that the path to a better future for humankind is already known. We must only work harder to find the meaning in our traumas, whether we remember them or not. REFERENCES [1] Peter Osborne (2005). How to Read Marx, p88. W.W. Norton & Company: New York Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Sarah Valentine, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine Source: Journal of Trauma and Dissociation Read time: 1.9 minutes This Happened In July 2024, a study was published claiming to show that transgender-related experiences and the negative perceptions transgender people hold of themselves are fear-inducing enough to cause posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Who Did This? Psychologist Sarah Valentine, PhD, conducted the study. Her program of research addresses care for PTSD among racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minority populations. The Claim The study was conducted on 43 transgender and gender diverse (TGD) adults who responded to advertisements distributed at clinics and at a conference. They found that transgender-related stress experiences significantly associated with severity of PTSD symptoms. The authors interpreted this to mean that transgender-related stress causes PTSD even though the stress is not the life-threatening type of stress that is known to cause PTSD. The revelation of this, according to the researchers, is that this conclusively explains why TGD people show PTSD at higher rates than the general population. Analysis The measure of transgender-related stress experiences was flawed at least three different ways. (1) Seventeen items measured events, such as “difficulty finding a bathroom to use,” and “heard negative statements about transgender” people, but no attempt was made to determine if these were experienced as positive or negative. The literature on stressful experiences has shown that it cannot be taken for granted how different individuals perceive events. (2) No attempt was made to date each event. The researchers did not know if reported events happened before or after development of PTSD symptoms. (3) Twenty-nine items measured perceptions (e.g., “People don’t understand me because they don’t see my gender as I do” and “When I think about my gender identity or expression, I feel unhappy”), which are not experiences. It's conceivable that participants imagined what others think about gender even if discrimination acts rarely happened to them. These types of perceptions seem nearly identical to a character trait called neuroticism. Decades earlier, it was established that one of the best predictors of who develops psychiatric syndromes, including PTSD [1], was neuroticism, which describes excessive anger, anxiety, irritability, and emotional instability following minor frustrations, difficulty calming, and viewing situations as overwhelming [2]. An alternative explanation of the findings is that a large proportion of this self-selected TGD sample had high levels of neuroticism, and many, if not most, of the PTSD symptoms were false positives. Why Is This Happening? What’s the value to transgender people and their advocates of creating a narrative that existing as a transgender person puts them at higher risk for PTSD? It doesn’t help individuals manage distress or attain self-knowledge if it teaches them erroneously that society is the problem, behaviors are misdiagnosed, and they should not engage in introspection about their own weaknesses. The value seems apparent when these types of flawed studies are placed in the context of historical ideologies for fighting social injustice that derive their appeal from oppression. We are witnessing an attempt to control language in academia by creating a category of “oppression-based stress” [3] that has special power to harm. The truth is that everyone faces stress, and there is no good evidence that oppression stress is any different from other stress in quantity or quality. The only difference is the valence that some advocates place on oppression as part of an ideology that fits their worldviews. REFERENCES [1] McFarlane AC (1989). The Aetiology of Post-traumatic Morbidity: Predisposing, Precipitating and Perpetuating Factors. British Journal of Psychiatry 154(2):221-228. doi:10.1192/bjp.154.2.221. [2] Widiger TA, Oltmanns JR (2017). Neuroticism is a fundamental domain of personality with enormous public health implications. World Psychiatry 16(2):144-145. doi:10.1002/wps.20411. [3] Sarah Valentine and Kelly Harper (4/17/2023). Adaptation of evidence-based treatments for PTSD for sexual and gender minority youth. Grand rounds presentation for University of California, San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. YouTube accessed 7/30/24. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS Amanda C. Venta, Ph.D., University of Houston Source: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened In July, 2024, a group of eleven psychologists from universities in southern Texas and Mexico published an editorial to promote trauma-informed policies for migrant families who become separated due to current U.S. policies. Who Did This? The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, led by an eight-member Antiracism Team of editors, is committed to producing a special series of articles devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Amanda Venta, the first author on this editorial in the series, specializes in the psychological functioning of adolescents from Central America who recently immigrated and attachment theory. The Claim The editorial recalled the controversy in 2018 about the Trump administration policy that attempted to deter illegal border crossings by detaining parents which de facto caused separations from their children. The key protest coming from scientists at the time was the claim that separations were traumas, which thereby invoked the toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACE) assertions that these exeriences cause permanent neurobiological damage and lifelong physical diseases. This policy no longer exists, so the editorial focused on two other types of separations. The first type is during illegal crossings when males and females are sometimes processed separately. This causes stress of uncertainty for mothers who get released first with children and do not know how long to wait for fathers to be released. The second type stems from legal attempts to cross at border entry points but families are forced to wait in Mexico while their requests for asylum are processed. If living situations become too dangerous, mothers and fathers may decide to split up on purpose and enter illegally. The authors asserted that both types are traumas caused by U.S. policies. Hence, these families ought to be allowed to remain together; they should be housed in the community instead of detention centers; and they should be given mental health care after they are settled in the U.S. Analysis Trauma was the foundation of the editorial, being mentioned five times in the brief work. The alleged trauma of the 2018 child separations was invoked for context even though both current types of separations do not involve child separations from both parents. The editorial concluded with the oft-repeated appeal, “Now is the time to lead with science…” So, what does the science say? There are zero studies of the separated children in the U.S., mostly because the separation policy lasted only three months. Studies conducted in Europe are flawed with self-report questionnaires, cross-sectional designs, or failures to parse out the impact of premigration experiences. The toxic stress and ACE theories of extraordinary and permanent damage to mental and physical systems are controversial and unproven (described here and here) despite advocates’ assertions that the science is settled. The two current separation types are not traumas; there is nothing inherently life-threatening about them. They may be stressful, which falls under the impossibly broad ACE umbrella, but the ACE theory is even more difficult to defend than toxic stress. Why Is This Happening? It’s a presidential election year, and record-high illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border is a top issue. The editorial did not mention Trump, but the media has already brought up the 2018 family separation controversy as a campaign issue. If Trump wins in November, it is unlikely that family separation will be repeated because Trump is the one who ended it in 2018 by executive order. In 2020, two prominent journals--Scientific American and Nature—made unprecedented endorsements of a presidential candidate, simply because the candidate was not Trump, who was labeled as anti-science. It seems probable that journals will be more active to influence the election in 2024. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Julian Ford, PhD, University of Connecticut Source: Journal of Trauma & Dissociation Read time: 2.1 minutes This Happened On June 21, 2024, Julian Ford, editor of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, announced a call for submissions for a special issue on understanding and treating dissociation in the context of intersectional inequalities. Who Did This? Julian Ford has been a researcher on psychological trauma for over four decades. He has published over 250 articles, served on editorial boards of multiple journals, and was the president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in 2018-2019. Like the strategy of Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman who attack the competency of those who disagree with them, he has embraced the notion that clinicians who do not follow his beliefs do harm to trauma victims by overlooking their true problems, misdiagnosing them, and giving them the wrong treatment. Ford was an early adopter of the controversial complex PTSD diagnosis, starting with a 1998 paper with his notion that traditional psychotherapy overwhelms and retraumatizes patients who have complex PTSD, causing them to dissociate. This notion has been debunked with evidence [1]. He may be best known for publishing a series of studies trying to promote a theory that interpersonal and multiple traumas, what he calls polyvictimization, has special, harmful effects that other traumas do not have. Using weak, cross-sectional studies with samples of convenience, he has not proven such extraordinary causal relations. Ford attributes the high severity of patients’ symptoms wholly to their experiences of polyvictimization and makes no mention of the possibility that other factors, such as genetics or nontrauma factors, could have caused their problems [2]. The Claim Intersectionality was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an attorney and law school professor who was one of the founders of the systemic racism-based critical race theory. Intersectional theory posits that multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination combine to cause damaging social and political identities. Racial groups are defined not simply by additive inequalities of gender, class, sexuality, and immigration status, but by effects that are greater than the sum of those parts. While widely supported on the Left, the claim has been criticized, mainly by conservatives, as ambiguous, ignorant of broader social problems, focuses too much on group identities instead of individual differences, and a form of identity politics. The premise of Adverse Childhood Experiences—that the number of childhood experiences has a compounding effect—is the same premise as intersectionality, except in ACEs the predictors are any stress or trauma and the outcomes are mental and physical health. In the field of mental health, supporters of intersectionality claim that unless providers take intersectionality into account, they will somehow be providing inadequate, harmful, or wrong types of interventions for victims. Analysis “Intersectionality” is a successful ideological branding borne of the strategy that you can’t see a problem if you can’t name a problem [3], regardless of whether it is true. In the trauma world, the branding names of ACEs, toxic stress, and complex PTSD have been successful, too. The parallels between Ford’s theory of polyvictimization and intersectional theory are striking. It seems no coincidence that they arose concurrently during the phase of increasingly popular progressive leftist theories in academia, and not coincidentally the same time that the controversial and debunked theories of complex PTSD and toxic stress arose. It’s not clear whether they influenced each other in their early stages, but Ford’s editorial signals that these trauma theories have melded seamlessly with the racial- and class-based intersectional movement. It is noteworthy that intersectional theory is a causal theory, i.e., that oppressive life experiences borne of societal inequalities cause extraordinary human suffering and failure to flourish. ACEs, toxic stress, and complex PTSD likewise are causal theories of a similar kin. Swap discriminations, stresses, and traumas with capitalism, and they are nearly the same as Marxism, the original, enduring intellectual manifesto that attributes degradation of the human self wholly to life experiences, and which shares a skewed view of human nature that genetic differences play no role in variations of behavior and humans are highly malleable. REFERENCES [1] De Jongh A, Resick PA, Zoellner LA, et al. Critical analysis of the current treatment guidelines for Complex PTSD in adults. Depression and Anxiety. 2016;33(5):359-369. doi:10.1002/da.22469 [2] Julian D. Ford, Tobias Wasser & Daniel Connor. "Identifying and determining the symptom severity associated with polyvictimization among psychiatrically impaired children in the outpatient setting," Child Maltreatment 16 (2011): 216-226. [3] Kimberlé Crenshaw (December 7, 2016). The urgency of intersectionality. TED Talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Megan McElheran, Psy.D., psychologist, founder of Before Operational Stress Source: Newswires EIN press release Read time: 2.0 minutes This Happened A press release on June 24, 2024 announced that the leadership of a Los Angeles-based emergency medical ambulance service had been trained in the Trauma Informed Leadership Program, hailing it as a milestone as the first EMS company in southern California to complete such a program. Who Did This? Before Operational Stress (BOS) provided the Trauma Informed Leadership Program training. Founded by psychologist Megan McElheran, they are a private company based in Calgary, Canada. Believing the world is in the midst of a mental health epidemic, BOS tailors their training products to public safety personnel and first responders. BOS provides pre-recorded videos, live presentations, and support programs for employees. The Trauma Informed Leadership Program costs $500 per person. The Premise The premise of the BOS business model is that the stress encountered by first responders and law enforcement causes mental disorders. Their website asserts that 23% of public safety personnel suffer from PTSD and 50% screen positive for at least one mental disorder. The leadership program content is divided into four modules:
Analysis The Canadian government has adopted the phrase “operational stress injury” as a non-medical term for psychological problems caused by trauma exposure for military or first responders. The national Operational Stress Injury Social Support program was created in 2001. The word 'injury' was selected because it was believed a shift in language away from mental disorders— posttraumatic stress disorder, major depression, and anxiety—would persuade individuals to seek help more readily. The company’s assertion on their home page that 50% of public safety personnel have mental health conditions from workplace stress is wildly higher than the normal population. This misinformation comes from a single survey with major flaws [1]. Survey respondents were a self-selected sample of less than four percent of Canada’s public safety personnel. The participants knew they were selected for being public safety personnel and they may have been motivated to register their perceptions of workplace stress. This finding contrasts with most other literature that has found first responders to be an especially resilient population. For example, a literature review of police officers exposed to trauma events found rates of probable PTSD closer to 7% [2]. An analysis of their year-long program for public safety personnel was unconvincing. Only 19 participants completed measures six months after the program out of a possible 203. Small, statistically significant improvements were found in PTSD, quality of life, stigma, and perceived social support. They failed to find improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, alcohol use, emotional regulation, and resilience [3]. Why Is This Happening? While the Before Operational Stress group has adopted some of the trauma-informed movements' branding language, they seem to have embraced a lite-version of the ideology: Their website is not filled with the trauma-informed misinformation that toxic stress and ACEs damages brains. It is a concern, however, that they promote the theory that humans are highly malleable to life stress. Evidence continues to mount that programs built on that notion are not very helpful for people who need help the most. REFERENCES [1] Carleton RN, Afifi TO, Turner S, Taillieu T, Duranceau S, LeBouthillier DM, et al. (2018). Mental disorder symptoms among public safety personnel in Canada. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 63:54–64. doi: 10.1177/0706743717723825 [2] Regehr C, Carey MG, Wagner S, Alden LE, Buys N, Corneil W, et al. (2021). A systematic review of mental health symptoms in police officers following extreme traumatic exposures. Police Practice and Research 22(1):225-239 doi: 10.1080/15614263.2019.1689129 [3] Stelnicki AM, Jamshidi L, Fletcher AJ, Carleton RN (2021). Evaluation of Before Operational Stress: A program to support mental health and proactive psychological protection in public safety personnel. Frontiers in Psychology 12:511755. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.511755 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Frank Anderson, MD, psychiatrist Source: ABC News Read time: 1.9 minutes plus brief video This Happened Two days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a psychiatrist interviewed by ABC News warned viewers that you can develop PTSD by watching the video footage. Who Did This? Frank Anderson's personal website describes himself as an author, psychiatrist, therapist, speaker and “trauma specialist who’s spent the past three decades studying neuroscience and trauma treatment.” His website sells video trainings on Internal Family Systems theory—one 60-minute video for $50, three 60-minute videos for $149, and a more expensive six-video course. On the Internal Family Systems website, he is part of a team of presenters who sell twelve pre-recorded videos: This “$1,239.95 value [is] just $299.00 today.” He published a 2017 manual on Internal Family Systems therapy, a 2021 book on how to heal complex PTSD, and a 2024 autobiographical memoir of his childhood and adult struggles with shame and abuse. His memoir explained that he suffered childhood trauma when his parents took him to a psychiatrist for play therapy because they were concerned about his sexual orientation. His memoir was endorsed by Bessell van der Kolk and Gabor Maté. He appears frequently as a trauma expert on news shows and podcasts. The Claim In the adjacent 2-minute video clip, Dr. Anderson explained that individuals can get PTSD from watching the Trump assassination attempt or other violent videos. He further explained in a confusing change of topic his belief that there is a “sweet spot” of talking about violent video (not watching the video itself)—talking about the video several times is fine, but the harm occurs when talking about it six or ten times. Analysis
Those claims are wrong and debunked by evidence. There are no known case reports published of an individual developing PTSD from watching video violence toward a person they do not know personally. I have conducted or supervised the evaluations of over 500 trauma-exposed individuals in clinic work and five research studies on trauma, and have never encountered such a case. If Dr. Anderson knows of such a case, he ought to write it up: it would be the first one. The only known study of individuals exposed naturalistically to the same television footage of trauma and then assessed by interview involved children who witnessed the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion live in their classrooms [1]. None of the children had developed PTSD one year later. Nearly all other studies of viewing violent video were based on retrospective self-report questionnaires, methodologically flawed, and no subjects could be diagnosed with PTSD [2]. Anderson’s description of finding a sweet spot of talking about the events to prevent PTSD is misinformation. PTSD symptoms develop immediately following the moment of fear during trauma exposure in one hundred percent of cases. There is no evidence that talking about trauma events causes PTSD. His information about critical incident stress debriefing was mostly accurate but it’s relevant for decreasing severity of existing symptoms not causing or preventing them, and has nothing to do with watching violent videos. The individuals he described who watch or talk repeatedly about videos on purpose are the opposite of PTSD. In fact, individuals with PTSD typically avoid reminders about their experiences. REFERENCES [1] Terr LC, Bloch DA, Michel BA, Shi H, Reinhardt JA, Metayer S. Children's symptoms in the wake of Challenger: a field study of distant-traumatic effects and an outline of related conditions. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1999 Oct;156(10):1536-44. doi: 10.1176/ajp.156.10.1536. [2] Just one example of many such studies: Holman EA, Garfin DR, Lubens P, Silver RC (2020). Media Exposure to Collective Trauma, Mental Health, and Functioning: Does It Matter What You See? Clinical Psychological Science 2020, Vol. 8(1) 111–124, doi: 10.1177/2167702619858300 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. |
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