Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Anita Burgund Isakov, PhD Source: Trauma, Violence, & Abuse Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened Researchers conducted a literature review of 45 papers to examine how the concept of trauma-informed approaches (TIA) can apply to forced migrant families to improve services. Who Did This? Social worker Anita Burgund Isakov is an Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She has three first-author, and four secondary-author publications in the PsychInfo database. Her focus has been on foster care and family support services. This is her first paper focused on trauma. The Claim The aim of the literature review was “to understand the concept of trauma-informed approaches for migrant and refugee families.” From reading these papers, the authors extracted the following five topics on how TIAs have been applied: (1) Experiences of migration. In addition to true life-threat trauma experiences, migrants also can experience economic insecurity, discrimination, lack of privacy in asylum centers, and challenges of assimilating into a new country. (2) Conceptualization of trauma. Services must endeavor to convey greater understanding, respect, foster trust, be culturally-responsive, acknowledge intergenerational impacts, and strive for equity. This is the only way to be “genuinely healing” and “address the multiple layers of disparities” faced by migrants. (3) Theoretical frameworks of TIA. Several theoretical frameworks have variously involved cultural humility, intersectionality of racial-based discriminations, and resilience. (4) Approaches to trauma work. The authors asserted that cultural adaptations ought to be incorporated into psychotherapy techniques, but no studies have tested that. (5) Programs and interventions to support families. Several training exercises have been used to instill cultural sensitivity into service providers. Analysis The data in the papers they reviewed was uninformative. There are no randomized trials of TIA. Only nine of the 45 studies involved quantitative data. A method of analysis was lacking. There was no attempt to question the appropriateness or effectiveness of TIA. The review could make no definitive recommendations because nothing had been precisely defined or tested. The more concerning flaws of the review, however, lie in two more pernicious defects: (1) The aim of the review was flawed by circular reasoning. The usual scientific process is to gather data on a concept to demonstrate its validity. This review did the reverse. The authors reviewed papers that unquestioningly asserted the concept of TIA, and then concluded, of course, that the concept of TIA was vital. Critical thinking was absent. The authors ignored any benefits migrants might perceive from locating to more secure and free countries. (2) Verbiage was impossibly vague. The writing was an excess of words of trivial or vague content, typical of nearly every TIA publication. Deciphering a TIA manuscript is like deciphering hieroglyphics of a lost civilization, except that TIA jargon has never been coherent. For example, the Discussion section concluded, “The intersection of different forms of oppression and discrimination, such as racism and migration status, is recognized by other authors as an important aspect of TIA to forced migrants as it recognizes the unique experiences of each individual (Bastia, 2014; Lee & Choi, 2022).” This lit review, however, did not establish an impact of oppression or discrimination, much less a combined impact. Being recognized by other authors is not a form of evidence. Recognizing the unique experiences of individuals is both inherent in any reasonable encounter and sufficiently vague to mean little. Why Is This Happening? A criticism of TIA is that, more than a decade after being invented out of thin air, the concept is still vague [1]. It should be obvious by now that being vague is the point, so that it can be whatever activists want for any occasion.
TIA has never been an empirically-derived concept. It has always been a Leftist, neo-Marxist ideology that claims problems of human behavior are causal from severe oppression. TIA theory serves the crucial functions of asserting causation and maximal severity. For the ideology to change society as intended, the inequity outcomes must be greater so that the outrage must be greater, so that greater involvement of the State must be demanded. Victims don’t just need psychotherapy, they need all of society to accommodate them everywhere all the time, regardless of how it impinges on other rights and freedoms. References [1] Mark Smith, Sebastian Monteux, and Claire Cameron (2021). Trauma: An ideology in search of evidence and its implications for the social in social welfare. Scottish Affairs 30(4):472–492 DOI: 10.3366/scot.2021.0385. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Resti Tito H. Villarino, RN (left), Suzanne Cosh, PhD (right) Source: Asian Journal of Psychiatry and BMC Psychiatry Read time: 2.3 minutes This Happened In the November 2024 issue of Asian Journal of Psychiatry, a literature review by Tito and colleagues reported on the impacts of natural disasters on Filipinos' mental health. In the November 2024 issue of BMC Psychiatry, a literature review by Cosh and colleagues examined the degree to which a new concept called eco-anxiety associated with mental health problems. Who Did This? Resti Tito H. Villarino is a Registered Nurse and currently works as a Clinical Instructor at the College of Nursing at West Visayas State University, Philippines. He has published several articles on well-being in college students. This is his only first-author paper on psychiatric disorders. Suzanne Cosh is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of New England, Australia. She has approximately 30 first-author and over 40 secondary-author peer reviewed publications. Her most frequent first-author research topic is elite athletes, and none have been on trauma or severe stress. The Claim Tito and colleagues reviewed 32 studies. They searched for studies that assessed psychiatric problems related to events that could be attributed to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, including hurricanes, drought, and heatwaves. They concluded, as had all previous literature reviews on natural disasters, that these are associated with elevated PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Their message, however, was that the world ought to have heightened urgency because disasters are increasing in frequency due to man-made impacts. Cosh et al. reviewed 35 studies. They found that individuals who worry more about climate—the newfangled concept of eco-anxiety—show more symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress in a causal relationship. Their interpretation is that eco-anxiety is probably a normal response of rational humans to a true crisis, but it can become excessive. Analysis Tito and colleagues manipulated what should have been a run-of-the-mill literature review into a form of activism by attributing psychiatric suffering to allegedly oppressive human activities. They did not review any evidence about the frequency of disasters. They simply asserted that disasters are increasing in frequency as scientific consensus.
When counting the number of tornadoes of all strengths, there is no trend over the past sixty years; and when counting only the strongest tornadoes (EF3 and higher), “their number decreased by about 40 percent during the sixty years following 1954.” The situations are similar for snowfalls, precipitation, floods, drought, and wildfires. Eco-anxiety is not a validated disorder-level problem. Cosh and colleagues’ form of activism was to blindly accept the premise of eco-anxiety as a valid problem. They lightly touched on the debate of whether this newly-invented concept is a normal reaction of all normal people that can become excessive, or is one of many manifestations of other problems such as generalized anxiety disorder. A third option, which they, and leftist academia, typically ignore, is that eco-anxiety is a function of excessive neuroticism, one of the big five personality traits that has been shown to be more common in liberals [2,3]. Unfortunately, they did not collect the type of data that could have untangled this question. Cosh neglected to mention that there have been no interview-based assessments or other attempts to distinguish climate worries from these other problems. Climate anxiety, so far, has always been assessed with self-report, which is highly prone to false positives and misunderstandings. Why Is This Happening? The demand for crisis has outstripped the supply. The strategy of the liberal hegemony in academia and media has been to fabricate crises and claim they are existential threats to humanity. This has been most apparent in politics, but it is also common in psychology. Climate change is no different. As one group of researchers claimed what has been a common refrain, “The climate emergency will likely prove this century's greatest threat to public health” and we are facing “a potential mental health crisis” [4]. Based on evidence, this claim is absurd for multiple reasons. With just a bit more equipoise, they could have made the true, and more responsible claim, that climate is complex, man-made emissions are not a crisis, but the minds of many humans are vulnerable to believe fictions simply because they are seamless with their inner worlds [5]. REFERENCES [1] Koonin SE (2024). Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (Updated and expanded edition). BenBella Books: Dallas, TX. [2] McCann SJH (2018). State Resident Neuroticism Accounts for Life Satisfaction Differences Between Conservative and Liberal States of the USA. Psychological Reports 121:2, 204-228. [3] Widiger TA, Oltmanns JR (2017). Neuroticism is a fundamental domain of personality with enormous public health implications. World Psychiatry Jun;16(2):144-145. [4] Patrick R, Snell T, Gunasiri H, Garad R, Meadows G, Enticott J (2023). Prevalence and determinants of mental health related to climate change in Australia. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 57(5):710-724. [5] Scheeringa MS (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563 CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Karen-Inge Karstoft, PhD Source: Journal of Affective Disorders Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened Complex PTSD was invented in 1992 on the premise that certain types of events were more damaging than single-event traumas by being repeated and prolonged (a dose-response theory) and interpersonal in nature. In the December 2024 issue, the Journal of Affective Disorders published a study claiming to show that being a civilian refugee with indirect exposure to war qualified as one of those extremely damaging types of events. Who Did This? Psychologist Karen-Inge Karstoft is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, and has published 15 first-author and approximately 36 secondary-author research articles, mostly on trauma or PTSD. The Claim Researchers sent requests to participate in their research study to all 18,389 adult Ukrainian refugees registered in Denmark. They received completed electronic surveys from 6,761 individuals. The types of experiences that counted as exposure to war included hometown was affected by war (with or without damage to their own homes), witnessed first-hand or just heard about combat, and lost a family member or close friend due to war. Using ICD-11 diagnostic criteria, they found that 15.9% fulfilled criteria for PTSD but not complex PTSD, and 13.5% fulfilled criteria for both PTSD and complex PTSD. They tested the dose-response premise by predicting that exposure to more war events would lead to more diagnoses of complex PTSD. This was not supported. Of the seven types of war exposure they measured, four significantly associated with PTSD, but only two significantly associated with complex PTSD. The also tested the interpersonal premise by predicting that interpersonal trauma events prior to the war would lead to more diagnoses of complex PTSD. This was not supported. The authors claimed, however, this was supported with a misleading interpretation of their data: The odds ratio of interpersonal events with PTSD was 1.17, and for complex PTSD was 1.44, both of which were significant and similar in magnitude to each other. The authors asserted that 1.44 was higher than 1.17, but they did not conduct a significance test. Analysis There are multiple major flaws in this study. First, researchers did not gather information on whether events were repeated, prolonged, or interpersonal. These qualities seem to have been assumed. Second, their assessment method did not determine the onset of any symptoms in relation to war exposure. They have no idea if PTSD symptoms, or the so-called complex PTSD symptoms, were present before or after war started. Third, they used self-report questionnaires which are prone to false positive diagnoses. The researchers nevertheless expressed zero reservations about the existence of complex PTSD in this sample.
The absurdity of the evidence claimed by complex PTSD activists is described here and here. The proposed disorder was rejected by both DSM-IV and DSM-5 due to absence of evidence, but the ICD adopted it in 2019 for political reasons. Despite the absence of validity, researchers frequently add new populations that allegedly have high rates of complex PTSD including prisoners in jail, gang members, violent criminals, prisoners of war, foster care children, soldiers, refugees without war exposure, domestic violence victims, police officers, North Korean defectors, and cardiac surgery patients. As I wrote in my book, “The fundamental appeal of complex PTSD is moral, not scientific. To believe in complex PTSD is to believe in a mission to save weaker, disadvantaged people from being victims of stronger perpetrators. By supporting this mission, the believer is imbued with higher moral status. That is the true value of complex PTSD.” [1] The most enduring lesson of the complex PTSD scandal is that in the social sciences, where manipulation of soft data and misleading interpretations are chronic affronts, the most concerning aspect is that researchers seem to easily believe their own deceptions. REFERENCES [1] Scheeringa, M. S. The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. (Central Recovery Press, 2022). CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Alexander "Sandy" McFarlane, MD Source: BMJ Military Health Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened In the October 2024 issue, BMJ Military Health published a study that assessed inflammatory factors pre- and post-deployment in Australian soldiers to examine if trauma changes the biology of inflammation. Who Did This? The senior author was psychiatrist Alexander “Sandy” McFarlane, the Director of The University of Adelaide's Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies. He has received numerous awards and published over 250 articles and chapters and has co-edited three books. Dr. McFarlane’s work focused on the impact of disasters, longitudinal course, and cognitive deficits of PTSD. The first author was a young psychologist, Neanne Bennett, who appears to be a post-doc. She has two first-author publications. The Claim The hypothesis of the study was that exposure to combat trauma would cause both high levels of psychological symptoms and increased levels of inflammation, measured as C reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin 6 (IL-6). This represents another test of the so-called toxic stress theory that trauma permanently damages brains and alters neurobiology. Symptoms of PTSD and blood samples were gathered on personnel of the Australian military special forces one month prior to deployment to the Middle East. The deployment lasted for less than 6 months. They were able to collect the same measures on 63 of those personnel not more than 4 months post-deployment. All were male. Changes in CRP levels from pre- to post-deployment did not associate with severity of pre-deployment PTSD symptoms but did positively correlate with post-deployment PTSD symptoms. This seemed to agree with their main hypothesis (but see below for problems). Changes in IL-6 did not associate with severity of either pre- or post-deployment PTSD symptoms, contrary to their hypothesis. In a secondary analysis, they subdivided their modest size sample into four subgroups so that they could compare the least affected to the most affected individuals: (1) High Function (lower trauma symptoms, lower trauma exposure) n=35 (2) Resilient (lower trauma symptoms, higher trauma exposure) n=11 (3) Vulnerable (higher trauma symptoms, lower trauma exposure) n=9 (4) Risk (higher trauma symptoms, higher trauma exposure) n=7 The most affected (Risk) group showed a significantly greater decrease in CRP compared to the least affected (High Function) group. No difference was found for changes in IL-6. Both of these findings contradicted their hypothesis. Despite the contradictions between hypotheses and findings, the authors concluded that “sustained and repeated exposure to a range of occupational stressors throughout a military member’s period of service are likely to have a cumulative impact...,” consistent with the toxic stress theory. Analysis None of their hypotheses were satisfied. CRP levels did not increase in lockstep with increased symptoms. In their secondary analysis of tiny subgroups, CRP actually decreased in the most affected Risk group, which was opposite of their theory. IL-6 levels did not change in either direction with symptoms in any analysis. How did the authors reconcile their conclusion of supporting the toxic stress theory with the complete absence of findings for IL-6? They did what nearly every supporter of toxic stress does. They spun the interpretation. They claimed that the nonsignificant IL-6 “elevations may represent an attempt to re-establish a homeostatic state,” which is a way of saying that they might have been unlucky in measuring variables at the wrong time. It is noteworthy that they did not perform the test that should have been conducted. It would have been a much better test to create a change score in PTSD symptoms from pre- to post-, just like they created change scores for CRP and IL-6. Because the researchers tested pre-deployment PTSD symptoms and post-deployment PTSD symptoms separately, they did not know the direction of change in PTSD scores of individuals. Prior Studies When pre-trauma prospective studies are reviewed, they do not support the toxic stress theory [1, 2, 3]. Instead, they strongly support only the diathesis stress theory which posits that neurobiological differences found in individuals with PTSD exist prior to any trauma exposures, most likely due to genetic causes.
The Bennett et al. study represents another failure of the toxic stress theory, which has been vigorously promoted by Jack Shonkoff and his Harvard center (see here and here) and is the basis of the best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score (see here). REFERENCES [1] Julia A. DiGangi et al. (2013). Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review 33:728-744. [2] Andrea Danese et al. (2017). The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians. American Journal of Psychiatry 174:349-361. [3] Michael S. Scheeringa (2020). 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 30:e1864. doi: 10.1002/mpr.1864 CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Robert H. Pietrzak, PhD Source: Journal of Psychiatric Research Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened In March 2024, a study was published using an eight-factor model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Previously, seven had been the highest number of factors considered to be the best model. In contrast, for more than three decades, PTSD had been diagnosed as just three clusters of symptoms. Who Did This? Psychologist Robert H. Pietrzak was the senior author on the study. He is a professor of Psychiatry and of Public Health at Yale University, and works at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. He has over 400 research publications, including at least twelve using factor analysis of PTSD symptoms. The Premise In this study, researchers collected data from 3,847 veterans on the twenty symptoms in the PTSD diagnostic criteria [1]. They created eight groupings of those symptoms to replicate an 8-factor model that recently had been created by the same research group [2]. Researchers found that three of the eight factors correlated with depression, four of the eight factors correlated with anxiety, and four of the eight factors correlated with suicidal ideation. The authors concluded that these findings demonstrated validity of the 8-factor model. They suggested that this model may lead to better assessment, treatment, and prevention of PTSD. The details of this study are summarized very briefly here because they are inconsequential. As the analysis below reveals, this study is emblematic of a larger problem in trauma research. Analysis This study is one of approximately six hundred studies over the past four decades using the results of a statistical technique to discover or confirm factors of PTSD. The statistical technique is usually some variation of factor analysis. Briefly, factor analysis works by calculating how frequently each symptom is present with every other symptom. The mathematics then reduces a large number of items into a handful of factors by grouping items that tend to co-occur with each other into a factor, and separating those that co-occur relatively less frequently into other factors. The premise of factor analysis is that there exists a latent model of a construct that cannot be directly measured. This type of premise is unprovable with current technology. Whether the latent model exists is a theoretical question. Why is this important? When criteria for psychiatric disorders were revised for the 2013 publication of DSM-5, a tragic decision was made that has gone barely noticed. The old three cluster algorithm of symptoms used to make a diagnosis was thrown out and replaced by a four-cluster algorithm. The sole reason for this momentous change was because many factor analysis studies had shown four factors was the best mathematical solution. For the first time in history, factor analysis research was used to change diagnostic criteria. There have been at least seven important reviews of the massive factor analysis of PTSD literature. In the most recent review, I analyzed 206 studies on different metrics of whether factor analysis is a useful technique for designing diagnostic criteria [3]. There were too many interesting findings to summarize here, so, I’ll mention only two highlights. 1. In sixty-six confirmatory factor analysis studies with adults using DSM-5 criteria, researchers found twelve different best-fitting models that ranged from one to seven factors. A four-factor model was best-fitting most often, however, that was in only 59% of studies. With this variety of outcomes, factor analysis is closer to stamp collecting than a valid method of discovering human nature. 2. Results were contingent on which models researchers opted to study. Whenever four-factor models were tested against models with more than four factors (five, six, or seven factors), the four-factor model was best fitting in only 12.8%! Because factor analysis tries to find the model that accounts for the most mathematical variance, the model with a higher number of factors is almost always the best fitting. That is probably why the new 8-factor model was best-fitting in its inaugural test. When someone creates a 9-factor model, that will be best-fitting. So, how many underlying factors really exist in a model of PTSD? Schmitt and colleagues probably have the answer. They conducted perhaps the most rigorous factor analysis possible, trying to avoid methodology pitfalls that have snared less careful researchers [4]. They concluded overall the “results provide greater evidence for a one-factor model.” References [1] Stiltner B, Fischer IC, Duek O, Polimanti R, Harpaz-Rotem I, Pietrzak RH (2024). Functional correlates of a novel 8-factor model of PTSD in U.S. military veterans: Results from the National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study, Journal of Psychiatric Research 171:69-74. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2024.01.017. [2] Gross GM, Spiller TR, Duek O, Pietrzak RH, Harpaz-Rotem I (2023). Clinical significance of novel 8-factor model of DSM-5 PTSD in national VA PTSD residential treatment data: Internally- v. externally-cued intrusions, Journal of Affective Disorders, 328:255-260. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.02.046. [3] Scheeringa MS (2024). Is factor analysis useful for revising diagnostic criteria for PTSD? A systematic review of five issues ten years after DSM-5. Journal of Psychiatric Research 176:98-107. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2024.05.057. [4] Schmitt T A, Sass DA, Chappelle W, Thompson W (2018). Selecting the "best" factor structure and moving measurement validation forward: An illustration. Journal of Personality Assessment, 100(4), 345-362. DOI: 10.1080/00223891.2018.1449116. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS James T. Allegretto, Executive Director, Youth of North Carolina Source: WHQR public media Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On August 22, 2024, a one-day summit was held in Wilmington, North Carolina to educate staff of youth-serving organizations about ways to minimize or cope with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). Who Did This? Youth of North Carolina, a non-profit organization, sponsored the summit. Their executive director, James Allegretto, joined the organization in 2022. The Premise The Youth Resilience Summit was advertised as “an exciting and informative day to discover how you can better minimize adverse childhood experiences and build resilience for our children.” The keynote speaker was retired basketball star Kenny Anderson. Speakers included the chief judge of the local court district (Independent) and the local district attorney (Democrat), referring to themselves as Batman and Robin while fighting for justice together for over 25 years. Also among the fifteen speakers was the current Democrat nominee for governor Josh Stein. Eleven presentations were offered on topics including:
The chief judge told a reporter that too many people cling to an old ‘tough-on-crime’ philosophy, whereas his aim is to identify the root causes of criminal behavior, which include adverse childhood experiences. Analysis No matter how you slice these types of events promoting ACEs, whether it’s negatively focused on the alleged harms or, like this one, positively focused on resilience, the foundational message is the same: Human minds are incredibly fragile to environmental psychological insults. The message is based on the belief that ACE research has established an incontrovertible fact that adverse experiences in childhood cause permanent harm in the forms of adult mental problems and physical illnesses. The problem is that none of it is true. Adverse childhood experiences are associated with adult illnesses, but it is because bad things tend to travel together in life due to other shared factors. Childhood experiences do not cause these catastrophic outcomes. While well-intentioned on humanitarian goals to help children, ACE programs are destined to fail. Trauma Dispatch documented some of the pushback against the ACE ideology and ACE screening here. As the negative ACE message of catastrophic harms has grown a bit stale, the movement has been shifting to focus on resilience. Both messages are counterproductive for children. The harm message teaches children that they are incredibly fragile, and the resilience message teaches them that they are not naturally resilient.
Why Is This Happening? Allegretto was quoted as saying, “It almost feels like a movement, right? But the reality is that we discovered how adverse childhood experiences impact people two decades ago, and we're just now getting on board and making a difference.” The movement is based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals that care for the disadvantaged trumps other moral concerns and that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences. Events like this promoting ACEs have been happening for the past fifteen years around the United States every week in the form of conferences, workshops, and professional development trainings. Trauma Dispatch has documented some of their content here, here, and here. It’s an attractive ideology to believe in because researchers have used slippery language to conflate association with causation, and because it appeals to the compassionate impulse to help the disadvantaged. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Alexandra Sullivan, PhD Source: Psychological Science journal Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened A new study published this month was the first to test whether psychotherapy that addresses trauma in very young children can potentially prevent serious disease later in life by slowing down the aging of the body’s cells [1]. This kind of extraordinary claim tends to generate media interest. It was reported by at least one local, one national media outlet, and highlighted by the National Institutes of Health program that funded the work. Who Did This? Alexandra Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Intergenerational Developmental Health Program at the University of California San Francisco. The director of the project was psychologist Nicole R. Bush, who has first- or co-authored over 200 papers. They are both trying to prove how stressful life experiences become biologically embedded in physiology and epigenetics and cause health problems. The Claim The outcome variable in this study used an epigenetic age clock, which is based on measuring the number of methyl groups attached to DNA strands. Methylation occurs at cytosine-guanine pairs, called CpG sites. Certain regions, which tend to regulate DNA expression, are unmethylated. It is believed that methylation at these sites can function like an off switch to stop DNA expression. Most vertebrate DNA regions, however, are not regulation sites, and they are methylated in the natural state. Researchers realized that methyl groups are lost and added to DNA over time due to wear and tear. Steve Horvath figured out that this happened systematically with age, and, in 2013, developed the first epigenetic age clock based on 353 CpG sites (193 increase with age, 160 decrease with age) [2]. When the clock calculates a person’s epigenetic age older than their chronological age, this is called “age acceleration,” allowing researchers to speculate that premature aging may have been caused by stressful experiences, which has downhill effects of illness or early death. In the current study, Sullivan and colleagues used an epigenetic clock designed for children based on 94 CpGs. Participants were mother-child dyads exposed to trauma or grief recruited from a clinic. Children were 3-6-years old. Two cheek swabs were taken from 45 children at the baseline start of therapy and again ten months later. A comparison group of 110 children of similar age was drawn from a different study that did not involve treatment. The two groups did not differ on age acceleration at baseline. The groups differed at the second time point, as the comparison group showed some age acceleration while the treated group showed significantly less age acceleration. The authors concluded, “Findings provide robust, quasi-experimental support that dyadic intervention is associated with trauma-related accelerated aging biomarkers, most likely in a direction beneficial for health and development.” Analysis This was the first study of this type in children. One similar prior study, in adult combat veterans, did not show a slowing down of age acceleration after receiving treatment [3]. There are multiple concerns about methylation studies as an index of bodily damage. While more than a dozen studies, mostly in adults, have shown that epigenetic age acceleration consistently predicts PTSD status, all were cross-sectional and have zero power to prove causation. In addition, age acceleration has been found (inconsistently) with anxiety, autism, depression, schizophrenia and other conditions, suggesting it’s a non-specific index of vulnerability, like baseline heart rate variability, and is not unique to stress or trauma. Another concern is that researchers don’t know if “age acceleration” in PTSD is maladaptive, or, being a misnomer, is an adaptive response. Epigenetics changes were not linked to any functional significance in this study. An alternative theory is that methylation changes are simply the residue of a complex system and interaction of many parts, and may have little to no functional consequence. Why Did This Happen? The authors’ conclusion is consistent with many trauma researchers who believe societal impacts and life experiences determine most of one’s lack of success in life. Rather than being the Holy Grail that will finally find scientific proof for a belief system, epigenetics appears destined to go the way of brain imaging. While most researchers still fervently claim that trauma damages brains, pre-trauma prospective studies show that brain differences pre-exist trauma exposure [4]. Epigenetic differences are likely to pre-exist life experiences, too [5], and any shifts during psychotherapy may be noise. REFERENCES [1] Sullivan, A. D. W., Merrill, S. M., Konwar, C., Coccia, M., Rivera, L., MacIsaac, J. L., Lieberman, A. F., Kobor, M. S., & Bush, N. R. (2024). Intervening After Trauma: Child–Parent Psychotherapy Treatment Is Associated With Lower Pediatric Epigenetic Age Acceleration. Psychological Science, 35(9), 1062-1073. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241260247 [2] Horvath S. (2013). DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types. Genome Biology 14(10):R115. doi: 10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115. [3] Katrinli, S., King, A.P., Duval, E.R. et al.(2023). DNA methylation GrimAge acceleration in US military veterans with PTSD. Neuropsychopharmacol. 48, 773–780. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01537-z [4] Julia A. DiGangi et al. (2013). Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review 33:728-744. Andrea Danese et al. (2017). The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians. American Journal of Psychiatry 174 (2017): 349-361. Michael S. Scheeringa (2020). Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research (2020). [5] Zannas AS, Linnstaedt SD, An X, et al. (2023). Epigenetic aging and PTSD outcomes in the immediate aftermath of trauma. Psychological Medicine 53(15):7170-7179. doi:10.1017/S0033291723000636 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. World’s top trauma conference is a nucleus for woke ideology. I counted the presentations.8/30/2024
CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS Source: International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) released the program schedule for its 2024 annual conference. Who Did This ISTSS is the world’s largest professional organization for researchers and clinicians interested in psychological trauma and stress. Over 1,000 attend its annual conference, which is where all the leading trauma researchers present their latest works. The Premise Being the premium gathering of trauma researchers, this conference influences the direction of research and clinical practice, and educates the next generation of professionals. It is the indispensable venue for networking and getting your work recognized. Analysis Over three days in November 2024, approximately 527 talks are scheduled. Of those, 170 (32%) will promote ideology of progressive leftist ideas. The breakdown of those 170 talks, is that 126 will be on oppression-based stress. Racial discrimination is the most common (44), followed by LGBTQ+/transgender discrimination (21), followed by immigrant discrimination, historical/intergenerational trauma, moral injury, and man-made climate change. These oppression experiences are controversial concepts for which no good evidence exists that they cause psychological disorders. There will also be 28 talks on toxic stress and 16 on complex PTSD. Lest one thinks these concepts will be presented in a neutral fashion that will stimulate productive debate of opposing views, that will not happen. I attended my first ISTSS conference in 2000 and presented my work for the next fifteen years. It was the conference I most looked forward to every year because PTSD research was a fresh field. Groundbreaking studies on important topics were being conducted. Gradually, the conference became overrun with controversial topics by activist researchers. I tried to generate debate from the audience, but this never went far. The presenters and audience members seemed to have no intellectual framework at the ready to understand how they might be mistaken. And, there were no other skeptics in the rooms to extend the discussions. I stopped going after 2017. What should talks focus on? The types of questions that would provide real help to victims of trauma include improving access to treatment (13 talks), accurate assessment (0), prediction of responders and nonresponders (0), better retention in treatment (12), implementing evidence-based treatments (25), innovations in therapy techniques (18), and mastery of therapy techniques (0). These will account for only thirteen percent of the program. Why Is This Happening? Institutions of higher learning suffer from ideological capture in which professors in academia are overwhelmingly liberal. In psychology, the ratio of Democrat to Republican faculty members is 16.8:1. In sociology, it’s 43.8:1, and in anthropology it’s 56:0 [1]. David Horowitz documented the impact of this imbalance in his books The Professors (2006) and Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom (2007). He described activism within campuses as attempts to deconstruct the nation’s identity and divide its communities into victims and oppressors, all under the banner of social justice. Chris Rufo diagnosed the genesis of this imbalance as the “long march through the institutions,” which he claims is the skeleton key for understanding the modern Left: it’s how they captured power, how they shape the narrative, and how they influence what you think about the world around you. It explains the invention of buzzwords and control of language that you hear but aren’t quite sure what they mean or where they came from. Rufo marks the 1960s as the shift of Marxist intellectual strategy from popular revolt to the long march [2]. But the groundwork was set in the early 1900s when many of the social sciences—namely, psychology, sociology, and anthropology—were born. The vagueness of these sciences make them ideal for bending scientific methods to support ideology. Those who gravitated to these fields were often self-selected individuals with fevered dreams of social justice [3]. The Heterodox Academy was formed in 2015 by three scholars to try to combat this lack of ideological diversity through blog posts and hosting discussions on campuses. They are trying to ensure that universities are truth-seeking and provide constructive disagreement. While large in size, the effort has been deemed a failure, however, because the discussions are often liberal professors debating with liberal professors [4]. Apparently, there aren’t many conservative professors to go around. REFERENCES [1] Mitchell Langbert (2018). Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty. Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:186–197. DOI 10.1007/s12129-018-9700-x [2] Christopher F. Rufo (2021). Critical race theory: What it is and how to fight it. Imprimis. A Publication of Hillsdale College 50(3), March 2021:1-5 [3] Carl N. Degler (1991). In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press [4] Nathan Cofnas (2022). Four reasons why Heterodox Academy failed. Acad. Quest. 35(4):13-24, DOI: 10.51845.35.4.4 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. 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. |
TRAUMA DISPATCH
|