Source: Australian Institute of Family Studies
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In August 2024, an Australian government agency issued a “practice guide” for researchers on how to conduct trauma-informed research.
 
Who Did This?
The first author on the report was psychologist Jasmine MacDonald, a Research Fellow in the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS). She has six first-author and five secondary-author research papers. Her first-author papers include literature reviews on depression and post-traumatic stress purportedly caused by the mental stress of being a journalist. She has conducted one study involving original data collection of trauma reactions (an online questionnaire of TV camera operators).
Her four co-authors on the report have conducted zero studies on trauma reactions.
The AIFS is an Australian Government agency. Its mission is “to conduct high-quality, impartial research into the wellbeing of Australian families” that can influence government policy and services for families.

​Most of the recommendations are already part of common sense IRB guidelines on how to obtain informed consent and respect participants’ privacy. But many recommendations were novel. The five sections used to organize the report and some of the more unique recommendations follow:
1. Planning and design
Consider how your research can be strengthened by “anti-oppressive” and “decolonising” frameworks.
2. Participant screening and recruitment
When recruiting a victim of trauma, the individual must be called “victim-survivor,” not “victim.”
3. Data collection
When collecting data, “use a location that is familiar.”
If participants would rather interact with their clinician rather than a research assistant, that should be accommodated.
Let participants choose where they sit.
Make sure recording devices are positioned so they do not “reinforce power imbalance.”
Encourage participants to bring support persons during the research.
Avoid “asking ‘why’ questions as these may be perceived as judgmental.”
“Start with the least sensitive questions and gradually move to questions about sensitive content.”
4. Analysis and dissemination
“Consider applying an intersectional lens to the data.”
5. Project team self care
As a researcher, “Reflect on your own traumatic experiences” throughout the research project and have a self-care strategy in place to keep you “grounded and calm.”
 
Analysis
The authors added a not-so-small caveat on the final page: “To date, there is a lack of evaluation of the impact of trauma-informed strategies on outcomes for participants in research and evaluation projects. We do not yet know if these approaches are achieving their intended goal and purpose of minimising negative impacts on participants or whether there are any unintended outcomes.” In other words, there are no data to show these recommendations are effective for any outcome and may instead by harmful (see similar conclusions here).
The authors provided assurance, however, that they were experts because “The literature informing this practice guide was mostly based on the experiential learnings that authors have had while conducting their own case study or research/evaluation projects.” They neglected to mention that none of the authors have experience interacting with a live human research participant who has experienced trauma.
This guide is the nightmare for most clinical researchers. If university IRB committees adopted these practice guides, standardized or efficient research would not be feasible on any clinical population.

Source: NCTSN
Read time: 2.1 minutes
 
This Happened
On September 6, 2024, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) newsletter announced a new webpage reiterating their support of trauma-informed pediatric psychiatry.
 
Who Did This?
The NCTSN was founded in 2000 and has been continuously funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. Funding supports two sites—UCLA and Duke University—that co-direct a network of hundreds of sites that have been supported to create and disseminate knowledge about assessment and treatment of trauma in children and adolescents.
 
The Premise
The new webpage outlined the premise and guiding principles of trauma-informed care, and included links to other resources on its website.
The premise is that trauma causes such a wide range of problems for victims that the only type of credible care requires consideration of biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors. Most importantly, these considerations must extend across all of society where trauma victims make points of contact for services. Humanitarian ethics demand this special treatment because thoughtless healthcare practices, such as careless comments at the check-in desk or judgmental attitudes in the office, can retrigger victims and compound their suffering [1].
 
The six principles of trauma-informed care, as defined by SAMHSA, are [2]:
Safety
Trustworthiness and Transparency
Peer Support
Collaboration
Empowerment
Cultural and Historical Awareness
 
Analysis
There are numerous major concerns that have been expressed about trauma-informed care.
Lack of evidence. A recent review of trauma-informed care implementations could locate only six studies of decent quality, and none were randomized [1]. The review concluded: “We found limited, mixed, and conflicting evidence for the effects (or perceived effects) of trauma-informed organisational change interventions…” Another recent review that was written to critique the premature embrace by the Scottish government for establishing trauma-informed care in national policy also found a lack of evidence [3].
Conceptual. Nearly a decade after appearing on the scene out of the blue, the concept is still vague. People are still not sure what it is [3].
Control of Language and Ideas. The vagueness of the concept seems on purpose. Trauma-informed care is not simply treatment by a doctor or therapist who understands how to treat psychological trauma, although proponents place their umbrella over such care (imagine how impish it would seem to extend this type of language to surgeons who operate on broken bones as skeleton-informed care). The broad and vague conceptualization makes sense when understanding that trauma-informed care is a movement, not a science-based intervention. Trainers who provide workshops on trauma-informed care are careful to emphasize that becoming trauma-informed is a transformation process (see here). The long-term aim is to change the culture for professionals to think and talk about trauma victims as highly fragile humans.
Misrepresentation of science. According to proponents of trauma-informed care, the situation is urgent because trauma causes permanent biological damage to victims’ brains and bodies. Despite this being a common belief among trauma experts, this belief has been repeatedly debunked (see here, here, and here).
Unintended consequences. Framing of suffering in a way that humans are highly fragile has the possible unintended consequences of creating false beliefs of how people understand themselves and creates a sense of feeling less resilient than they really are [4].
 
Why Is This Happening?
This movement is consistent with the moral foundation of progressive liberals that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences—such that individual differences in success or failure are caused by experiences, not unchanging heritable traits—and care for the disadvantaged must supersede all other moral concerns (such as tradition, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty). The progressive sensibility yearns for a predictability that the movement of life and society can be controlled, to be able to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppression that caused all my problems.” That is a false certainty that has little prospect of truly helping individuals with deep-seated problems.
 
 
References
[1] Natalia V. Lewis, Angel Bierce, Gene S. Feder, John Macleod, Katrina M. Turner, Stan Zammit, Shoba Dawson, "Trauma-Informed Approaches in Primary Healthcare and Community Mental Healthcare: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review of Organisational Change Interventions", Health & Social Care in the Community, vol. 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages, 2023. DOI: 10.1155/2023/4475114.
[2] SAMHSA, “SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach,” HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014.
[3] 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.
[4] Mark Smith and Sebastian Monteux (March 2023). Trauma-informed approaches: A critical overview of what they offer to social work and social care. Insights: A Series of Evidence Summaries. The Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services. 

Source: Office of the Surgeon General
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In August 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory to draw immediate national attention to the mental health problems of parents.
 
Who Did This?
Vivek H. Murthy has served as the U.S. Surgeon General since 2021 when appointed by President Biden. He previously served in the same post 2013-2017 when appointed by President Obama. His medical training is in internal medicine. He has one research publication from 2004 when he was in training.
 
The Claim
This advisory (about 13 pages of text) asserted that mental health problems of parents in the U.S. are extreme, and worse, those are being passed down to their children. There is a long list of causes of mental stress that parents have always had to deal with, e.g., lack of sleep, finances, and worrying about children’s health. But now there are causes that previous generations did not have to consider—social media, influencers, the youth mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness—such that “success and fulfillment feel increasingly out of reach.”
Reversing this situation will take a combination of new government policies and programs plus culture change. He listed 34 action steps divided among government, employers, community organizations, and other groups.
 
Analysis
It is hard to reconcile Murthy’s assessment that parents are highly stressed with the fact that until the twentieth century parents have had to deal with far worse stress such as higher mortality for women during childbirth, higher death rates of children from diseases, unsafe working conditions, poverty, and uncertain food supply. Going even farther back in time they had to deal with basic survival issues, predators, frequent tribal warfare, and overall, much shorter life spans.
 
The only evidence Murthy cited that things are bad was that “41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” These data did not come from a research study. They came from a survey by Harris Polls.
 
Murthy never provided evidence, or even asserted, that parental mental health is worse now than in the past. The premise of an advisory is supposed to be that a new health problem has risen which requires national attention, but Murthy never made such a case.
 
His evidence that children are at high risk because of parental mental health problems was based almost entirely on the research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The ACE literature is, however, flawed, because it has been 100% cross-sectional and has nearly zero power to determine causal relations (debunked here).
 
Many of the 34 recommendations were simplistic platitudes that are not in dispute, such as sleep well, eat right, and “Connect with parents and caregivers in your life...” The quality of the report was low in terms of scientific rigor. It reads more like an undergraduate thesis than national policy guidance based on scientific consensus. No research was discussed in detail.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Murthy appears intent on being the Coddler in Chief of the nation’s mental health. A central premise was his unconventional claim that parents are vulnerable because they feel unappreciated by society. For example, “Many parents and caregivers feel undervalued for prioritizing parenting over employment...” Hence, many of his recommendations were for government, businesses, and communities to remunerate parents in various ways. This claim was contrary to most individuals’ experiences  because the value of being a parent has never been contingent on recognition from society. A truism of parenthood is that the love and special bond involved in raising children is the greatest joy in life.
This advisory follows a string of reports by Murthy with a similar theme that the U.S. population has reached an unprecedented stage of fragility, suffering from a wide range of new emotional and behavioral problems. His previous Surgeon General reports have included youth mental health, suicide prevention, youth violence, and loneliness. He seems to perceive the population as capable of being emotionally wounded by everyday stressors. This is consistent with a larger shift in the U.S. during the past decade driven by a portion of the population that implemented social emotional learning in K-12 schools, created campus cultures with safe spaces, protection from microaggressions, and fabricated moral panics over smartphones and eco-anxiety. This agenda reflects a biased intellectual framework about human nature and a utopian belief system that the role of government and society is to uplift humanity.
 
 
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Source: Congress.gov
Read time: 2.1 minutes
 
This Happened
On August 15, 2024, the text of a bill was made public that would amend an existing law to extend federal funding for trauma-informed programming in schools for five more years.
 
Who Did This?
The bill was sponsored by Jahana Hayes (D-CT). She was a public school teacher for fifteen years. Hayes was elected to her first term in Congress in 2019. She was a cosponsor of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in 2019 proposing a goal of 100% renewable energy; she introduced resolutions in Congress in 2020, 2023, and 2024 to declare racism a public health crisis; and she advocates for Israel to accept a cease fire deal with Hamas.
 
The Premise
HR 8981, the Supporting Trauma-Informed Education Practices Act, proposes to amend the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, which was passed in 2018 to stem the opioid drug crisis. The 2018 law created a sprawling set of new regulations that includes Medicaid and Medicare insurance coverage, FDA regulation, pharmacist duties, opioid addiction supports, workforce expansion, and public health education.
Funding for trauma-informed care in schools was folded into the public health section of the law on the  presumption that trauma was a driving force of substance abuse. It authorized $50 million per year for five years to fund grants to local agencies to implement the following:

• Provide screening of trauma, referral, treatment, and support services for students
• Implement schoolwide behavioral interventions with trauma-informed models
• Provide professional development training to teachers on social emotional learning and trauma-informed models

The law also created an interagency task force of 28 federal agencies to formulate policy, determine best practices, and disseminate directives.
 
The funding for the trauma-informed care component was time-limited, originally authorized only for 2019 through 2023. The 2024 amendment seeks to re-authorize that for 2025 through 2029. It also adds a new mandate to provide mental health services to teachers and other school staff.
 
Hayes introduced the same legislation in 2022 but it was not voted on.
 
Analysis
Studies show that many individuals who abuse  substances have experienced childhood traumas, but these data come from cross-sectional studies that cannot determine causation. While some vulnerable individuals  who experience trauma may escalate their use of substances, blaming substance abuse on trauma may be overly simplistic.
 
Providing public education about trauma sounds innocent on face value, but as other posts showed (here and here), trauma-informed philosophy is a pandora’s box of ideology that ranges far beyond research evidence. It teaches people that they are highly vulnerable to brain damage and lifelong physical illness if they experience trauma, when the truth is that most people have no enduring symptoms following trauma. Trauma-informed trainings are focused on creating a cultural shift in how people think about human nature as nearly defenseless to oppressive experiences. The amendment mischaracterized the status of these issues by labeling the program “evidence-based” six times.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The 2018 law that created the original trauma-informed component was sponsored by a Republican representative and co-sponsored by ten Republicans and six Democrats, and it was approved by a majority of both parties. This was unusual since trauma-informed bills are typically offered by Democrats because the ideology is in harmony with the progressive leftist vision of human nature and an agenda to expand government entitlement programs. It seems likely that the national concern about the massive opioid epidemic in the United States lowered Republicans concerns about including the trauma-informed component as a relatively small part of the law.
As the epidemic has dragged on, however, under a Democrat president, Republican support for the component has disappeared. The 2024 amendment is sponsored exclusively by Democrats, failed once before in 2022, and seems unlikely to pass this year.
 
 
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Source: KUNC NPR news
Read time: 1.8 minutes
 
This Happened
On July 27, 2024, a shelter for homeless youth in Denver held a grand opening of their new facility built with trauma-informed design.
 
Who Did This?
Urban Peak is a non-profit organization that provides temporary shelter, permanent housing, case management, street outreach, education, and medical services. The CEO, Christina Carlson, holds a masters degree in social work.
Shop Works Architecture, based in Denver, created the new shelter. The firm specializes in trauma-informed design. They are a believer in the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) narrative; their website links to former California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris’ TED Talk on ACES.
 
The Premise
The principle of trauma-informed design is that physical space can be so stressful as to cause mental problems in individuals who have previously been traumatized. Physical environments should promote calm, safety, dignity, and empowerment to protect and heal clients who are trauma victims and staff who suffer vicarious trauma on the job. These are achieved through spatial arrangement, furniture selections, artwork, ample light, soothing color, and greenery.

Of the $38 million cost, Denver government contributed $16.7 million, which came from the city’s $260 million RISE Denver bond, which was approved by voters in 2021 to fund a variety of projects.

Analysis
There are neither negative nor positive studies of trauma-informed architecture impact on well-being. Belief in the power of trauma-informed design, nevertheless, is a staple of the progressive vision for how to lift individuals out of poverty and achieve equity of outcomes with government and community assistance. While design elements can promote temporary spiritual inspiration, this vision promotes false hope because it is unlikely to address root causes of human behavioral problems.
Interior design change may seem like a harmless piece of activism, but the problem with calling a class of architecture trauma-informed design is that it lets go unchallenged another attempt to control language and ideas promoting the ideology that human nature is highly malleable, and genetic-based differences play no part in human behaviors. It serves as a constant symbolism of the misguided progressive intellectual framework that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and we simply need to counter oppression with new life experiences to change human nature. Those policies, having no basis in research, will not provide long-term help.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Non-profit organizations often act as quasi-governmental extensions to accomplish tasks that governments can’t do as easily. Government funds can be funneled to non-profits under humanitarian objectives with little debate or citizen input. It’s part of the administrative state to rule by science, and the state decides what the science is even when it is nonexistent.
 
 
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Source: Office of the California Surgeon General
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
On May 31, 2024, the California government’s ACEs Aware program released a three-minute promotional video featuring celebrity gamer Valkyrae for its new Live Beyond campaign.
 
Who Did This?
ACEs Aware is a more than $106 million program paid for by California taxpayers and run by the Office of the California Surgeon General. It promotes the narrative that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) cause an extraordinary array of mental and physical problems in adulthood.
Valkyrae, real name Rachell Marie Hofstetter, is a 32-year-old live-streamer who makes her living by filming herself playing video games and sharing her single social life. She is YouTube’s most-watched female streamer since 2020. Her channel currently has 4.09 million subscribers.
 
The Premise
The California ACE campaign began in 2019 as the first incentive-based program to pay pediatricians to administer ACE screens to children in their practices. The rationale was that ACEs were harmful psychological toxins that families needed to be aware of. Since 2024, the campaign has shifted the emphasis to focusing on resilience strategies with the Live Beyond campaign to complement its message about alleged harms.
 
The promotional video shows Valkyrae talking for three minutes about how she discovered the concept of ACEs through the ACEs Aware program and this changed her outlook on life. Her ACE was that she grew up with an alcoholic father. The short video below shows excerpts where she blames her father’s behavior for causing severe asthma, hives, and an anxiety disorder that led her to seek counseling:

Analysis
The ACE narrative is unproven as a scientific concept because it is based one hundred percent on weak cross-sectional studies that have zero power to determine causality. Valkyrae’s story is a perfect example: There was no mention of whether her asthma started before or after her father was an alcoholic; no mention of whether anxiety runs in her family and maybe anxiety could be genetically based. Instead, nearly everything that defines her is blamed on childhood stress.
Further, the proposed physiological mechanisms of how stress damages the brain and body are based on flawed, inconsistent, and non-replicable studies.
One of the co-authors of the original ACE studies, pediatrician Robert Anda [1], and others [2], have criticized misguided programs like the ACEs Aware screenings.
Her suggestions for coping with stress—therapy, meditation, exercise—are not bad, but they teach viewers the wrong lesson that other people are the cause of all their problems.
 
Why Is This Happening?
While the ACE narrative is pitched as a scientific discovery, it has always been primarily an ideology about the nature of human beings that was searching for some validation from research. The ideology is that life experiences, not genetics, molds human traits and determines which groups become advantaged or disadvantaged in society. This belief requires that human nature is highly malleable. This set of beliefs has been the foundation of nearly all progressive leftist projects for the past three hundred years. The creations of the ACE and toxic stress narratives were the long sought-after melding of modern science with liberal activism.
As a public health program, ACEs Aware was doomed from the beginning: It cannot improve the health of children it intends to help because it misunderstands the source of their problems. But as a cultural propaganda program to instill a belief framework in children, it was cunning.
 

REFERENCES
[1] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009
[2] John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708

 
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Source: National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
On 7/25/24, an email from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) announced the availability of an updated resource to educate clinicians on developmental trauma disorder (DTD).
 
Who Did This?
The NCTSN was founded in 2000, and is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The purpose was to raise the standard of care for children who experience trauma. A local site becomes part of the network by proposing to develop a specialized focus. There are currently 199 sites and 200 formerly-funded sites.
The resource on DTD was the work product of the University of Connecticut site, led by psychologist Julian Ford, Ph.D.
 
The Premise
The aim was to educate clinicians how to treat patients on the supposition they have DTD. The resource consists of 42 recorded webinars. Nearly all of them were dramatizations of treatment situations with actors, followed by discussions led by Julian Ford with other experts, and Q&A from the audience.
The situations were designed to emphasize emotion dysregulation, attachment, transgender identity, intergenerational trauma, racial stress, oppressed immigrants, dissociation, and family connection as a source of resilience.
 
Analysis
Developmental trauma disorder is not a recognized disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). It was rejected by the DSM-5 committee in 2012 because it lacked evidence of validity. Since then, no new evidence of validity has appeared. The advocates for DTD, however, passionately want this diagnosis to exist, and have simply ignored the lack of evidence. Their strategy over the past twenty years has been to assert that it exists and hope that force of repetition enthrones it into research and clinical cultures. In my book, The Trouble With Trauma, a chapter explains the history of how this disorder was fabricated, and the extraordinary lengths researchers have gone to invent flawed studies to support it [1].
 
One of the 42 modules was deceptively titled A Spirited Conversation About PTSD and Developmental Trauma Disorder: The Pros and Cons. The three discussants (John Briere, Julian Ford, and Michael Suvak) acknowledged that they all believed in the concept of DTD, and the only spirited thing about the conversation was their different opinions on how to implement it.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The NCTSN was founded on the promise that it would bring some evidence-based order to the wild west of therapy practices in the United States to help children who suffered trauma. While the network does a few good things to promote evidence-based treatments that are backed by science, it has achieved no major successes in making these treatments more commonly used by clinicians.
Instead, the NCTSN has become a national failure as a source of unreliable and extraordinary claims. The network heavily promotes ideologically-driven beliefs that are not supported by science, including white supremacy, toxic stress, complex trauma, trauma-informed practices in schools, intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, and misidentifies chronic stressors—racial discrimination, colonialism, and unconventional gender identities—as traumatic experiences when they do not meet the tradtional life-threat definition of trauma.
This is a concern because, by its national profile and sheer size, the NCTSN has become the main source of child trauma information and training.
 
I’ve explained the underlying cognitive motivation for this hub of activism as based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals who care for the disadvantaged to the detriment of other moral concerns (such as tradition, fairness, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty) [1]. Fighting for alleged victims of oppression best serves their need for moral status. This requires believing that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences, such that individual differences in success or failure are caused by experiences, not unchanging personal traits caused by genetics. The progressive sensibility yearns for a predictability that the movement of life and society can be controlled, to be able to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” That is a false certainty that leads nowhere good.
To use psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model, his analogy for how we form beliefs is a dog in which the body represents quick, moral judgements and the tail represents reason [2]. The tail does not wag the dog. NCTSN has become a body of outlandish assertions about trauma that are based on skewed moral judgements, and the tail of reason has no influence.

 
REFERENCES
[1] Scheeringa MS (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563
[2] Haidt J (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment, Psychological Review 108: 814-834.
 

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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.
 
 
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Source: City Journal
Read time: 1.7 minutes
 
This Happened
Trying to reverse Philadelphia’s slide as one of the worst major cities in the United States for homicides, violence, and crime, new mayor Cherelle Parker (D) declared a state of emergency based on crime In January 2024 immediately after taking office. During the 2023 race for mayor, Parker ran as a moderate compared to other progressive candidates by prioritizing public safety. She also selected new police commissioner Kevin Bethel.
Since coming into office Mayor Parker and Commissioner Bethel cleared out the infamous Kensington open-air drug market and cracked down on illegal packs of ATV and dirt-bike riders.
 
Why Is This Happening?
These changes came on the heels of previous mayor Jim Kenney (D) who had refused to declare a state of emergency despite record homicides. The city had 561 murders in 2021, its highest total ever; 80% of victims were Black. Kenney had supported defunding the police and sanctuary city status.
Bethel’s predecessor as police commissioner was Danielle Outlaw, who was lured from Portland, Oregon and hired in 2020. Emphasizing her status as the first Black woman to lead the police departments in Portland and Philadelphia, she had promised to tackle racism, gender discrimination, social injustice, inequity, and most of all, gun violence. Outlaw resigned in September 2023, shortly before the mayoral election, after three years of worsening crime under her watch. Philadelphia’s crime problems are also worsened by the policies of progressive DA Larry Krasner, who remains in office.
 
The background of crime in Philadelphia, however, has older roots in the city’s failed attempts to use trauma-informed approaches.
 
The Trauma-Informed Past of Philadelphia
Philadelphia was the first major city to deploy large-scale public health efforts under the banner of trauma and toxic stress. As described in my book, The Trouble With Trauma:
“In 2005, the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services initiated a transformation of the city’s mental health services in order to address high unemployment and murder rates. The keystone of this transformation was the creation of a trauma-informed system based on the premise that exposure to trauma and violence was causing these problems with unemployment and murder. The transformation included efforts to train clinicians in evidence-based psychotherapy for PTSD, and to bring together a large number of community human-service organizations to train their staff according to the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies.” [1]

Pulling together mental health experts, politicians, public health, and law enforcement, the plan essentially cast trauma as the largest public health issue we face in modern times, and we need massive funding for social programs to attack trauma on the order of the Manhattan Project that created the first nuclear bomb. It was supposed to address racism, inequities, and reduce violent crime.
 
Mayor Parker’s new crackdown on crime and sudden rediscovery of law and order seems to confirm that toxic stress public health efforts didn’t work. Neither the Mayor nor the police chief mentioned the failure of the 2005 trauma-informed initiatives.
 
REFERENCES
[1] Scheeringa MS (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563


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Source: National Association of Counties
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
First 5 Mendocino Commission brought together 42 agencies that support children’s wellbeing for its annual State of the Child summit in March. Speakers stressed that it is possible for children who encountered adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to grow beyond those experiences.
 
Who Did This?
First 5 Mendocino is a government agency that falls under the California Children and Families Commission, also known as First 5 California. It is one of 58 county commissions funded by a California state proposition tax. The board that runs First 5 Mendocino is appointed by elected officials.
Their charge is to create, support, or promote programs in the community focused on healthy child development in the first five years of life. The operationalization of that mission is an overarching metric of equity [1]. They emphasize that oppression, including institutional racism, creates intergenerational trauma.
First 5 embraces the ACEs and toxic stress narratives which claim that “the events of childhood shape a person’s biology, personality, dreams, and aspirations: their entire trajectory of life” [1]. Their stance is that “very few families have the support they need” and it is the government’s job to provide them (pages 12-14).
 
The Premise
The premise of the summit was to shift participants’ focus to resilience. For the past two decades, the trauma advocacy movement was fixated on promoting the theory of brain damage caused by trauma.  Megan Carson, Community Outreach Leader, said, “What we also started to realize was that people were getting hung up on that and losing hope.” The adjacent graphic shows the tree analogy, a fixture of the ACEs and toxic stress narratives, which displays an extraordinary assortment of societal stressors that presumably damage children’s brains and physical health [1].

Speakers included Tina Payne Bryson, social worker, director of a play therapy institute and book author who claims her works deploys the latest neurobiology research on the power of relationships to shape brain architecture and mold personalities.
Georgie Wisen-Vincent, marriage and family counselor, co-author with Bryson, and director of the play therapy institute, advocates using play to process traumas.
MaryCatherine McDonald, PhD, has been skeptical of using ACE scores to predict individual outcomes, and wrote a book that reframes trauma responses as the body’s natural adaptive responses rather than the breakage of fragile humans.
 
Analysis
Many within the sprawling movements of ACEs, toxic stress, and trauma-informed approaches have realized that they have a bit of a messaging problem. While their message that trauma damages the brain has been an eye-popping success at gaining adherents, the acceptance of this belief system ultimately can be a downer. It is ironic that movements that were born from marketing rhetoric find themselves hamstrung by their message.
As a result, there has been a slew of branding by many groups to highlight resilience. Agencies [2], projects [3], bills [4], and a documentary [5] have incorporated resilience into their titles. Oprah Winfrey and her frequent guest, child psychologist Bruce Perry, have staked one of the most extreme positions that a nurturing relationship in the first two months of life represents a nearly irreversible period for neural development [6].
 
The science of resilience, however, is as misguided as the science of the trauma narrative that it supersedes. Both are based on the claim that humans are highly malleable and life experiences can mold nearly every aspect of character and predict human flourishing. While the virtue of providing good care for young children is not disputed, the claim that parenting practices can shape the architecture of brains and impact adult physical illnesses is unproven and disputed by empirical research [7].
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] 2021-2026 Strategic Plan. First 5 Mendocino Commission. https://first5mendocino.org/first5-flipbook/PDF.pdf
[2] Doña Ana County Resilience Leaders (New Mexico); UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network; Hawaii Governor’s Office of Wellness and Resilience; Idaho Resilience Project
[3] Healthier Together Initiative Growing Resilience in Teens (GRIT) Grant Program (Philadelphia); North Carolina Center for Resilience & Learning; Community Resilience Initiative (Washington state); MassBay Community College, Institute for Trauma, Adversity, and Resilience in Higher Education
[4] Resilience, Investment, Support, and Expansion from Trauma Act, federal H.R. 4541 bill
[5] Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope (2016). James Redford and Karen Pritzker (producers). KJPR Films.
[6] Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. & Oprah Winfrey (2021) What Happened To You? Conversations On Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. New York: Flatiron Books
[7] Judith Rich Harris (1998), The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. New York: Free Press
Scheeringa MS (2018). They’ll Never Be The Same: A Parent’s Guide to PTSD in Youth. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1942094616
 
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