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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Alabama Daily News
Read time: 2.1 minutes
 
This Happened
On February 17, 2025, the Alabama Department of Mental Health (ADMH) announced the launch of a pilot program to train providers across the state in the Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) model.
 
Who Is Doing This?
Kim Boswell, MSW, ADMH Commissioner since December 2020, spearheaded the project. The pilot will be conducted in partnership with Gateway, a non-profit organization based in Birmingham. Gateway previously received a federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to train its own staff in this model.
 
The Premise
The attendees at the training will be ADMH leadership and mental health staff who work with schools. The Department hopes to eventually expand the initiative to every provider that works with children in the state.
 
The TST model is designed for children living with poverty, racism, inadequate schools, and community violence [1]. Thus, it is not for all types of trauma victims. The unique TST definition of traumatized children in such systems is those who have difficulty regulating their emotions and behavior, combined with inadequate social environments that are unable to protect them from reminders of threats [2]. Hence, much of the focus in TST is to address systems in which children exist, rather than individual psychotherapy.
The model posits a belief that recovery occurs in five hierarchical phases: 1. Surviving, 2. Stabilizing, 3. Enduring, 4. Understanding, and 5. Transcending.
 
Critical to the model is the belief in the theory of toxic stress in which humans are fragile and trauma permanently damages brains. Child victims are so fragile that insensitive classrooms can trigger them emotionally and cause disruptive behaviors and academic failure.
 
The purpose of the trainings is to install the intellectual framework for the TST model. As Boswell stated, “The model really is both a clinical model and an organizational model, and really where you have to start is having your leadership understanding trauma and how that impacts the behavior of kids.”
The desired outcomes of the project will be a decrease in the number of children being removed from families, an increase in the number of families willing to foster children, and an overall improvement in child mental wellbeing.
 
The governor’s budget denied ADMH’s request for funding for 2026. But Boswell feels so strongly about the program, she promised to find funds from elsewhere.
 
Analysis
Minimal, and mostly negative, evidence exists on the ability of TST to treat trauma. One trial showed improvements but lacked a control group [1,3].
The only existing randomized trial was tiny (10 in TST versus 10 in care-as-usual) and failed to show improvement on total PTSD scores within the TST group [4].

 Complex PTSD is another model that conflates stress with trauma. Saxe, however, has opted to develop his own model that shares a highly similar conceptualization of trauma responses. The TST model emphasizes treating attachment and emotional dysregulation, which makes it indistinguishable from complex PTSD.
 
Another concern about TST is the five-phase model is completely unvalidated. There is zero systematic evidence that recovery from stress proceeds according to phases. In the history of psychiatry, whenever sequential phases have been posited, they have always been found to be overly simplistic and unrealistic [6,7].
 
Dissemination of the TST model across Alabama’s providers who work with children will be a disaster. Not only does if fail to treat true trauma, it will waste resources and funding, it spreads disinformation that humans are fragile and that trauma damages brains, conflates stress with trauma, and promotes the fake complex PTSD concept.
 
​
References
[1] Saxe GN, Ellis BH, Fogler J, Hansen S, and Sorkin B (2005). Comprehensive Care for Traumatized Children. Psychiatric Annals, 35(5), 443–448. DOI: 10.3928/00485713-20050501-10.
[2] Navalta CP, Brown AD, Nisewaner A, Ellis BH, and Saxe GN (2013). Trauma systems therapy. In Treating complex traumatic stress disorders in children and adolescents: Scientific foundations and therapeutic models. (pp. 329–347).
[3] Ellis BH, Fogler J, Hansen S, Forbes P, Navalta CP, and Saxe G (2012). Trauma systems therapy: 15-month outcomes and the importance of effecting environmental change. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 4(6), 624–630. DOI: 10.1037/a0025192.
[4] Saxe GN, Ellis BH, Fogler J, and Navalta CP (2012). Innovations in practice: Preliminary evidence for effective family engagement in treatment for child traumatic stress–trauma systems therapy approach to preventing dropout. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 17(1), 58–61. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-3588.2011.00626.x.
[5] DePierro J, D’Andrea W, Spinazzola J, Stafford E, van Der Kolk B, Saxe G, Stolbach B, McKernan S, and Ford JD (2022). Beyond PTSD: Client presentations of developmental trauma disorder from a national survey of clinicians. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 14(7), 1167–1174. DOI: 10.1037/tra0000532.
[6] Littell J, Girvin H (2002). Stages of Change: A Critique. Behavior Modification 26(2):223-23. DOI: 10.1177/0145445502026002006.
[7] Stroebe M, Schut H, and Boerner K (2017). Cautioning health-care professionals: bereaved persons are misguided through the stages of grief. Omega 74, 455–473. DOI: 10.1177/0030222817691870.

Source: Centers for Disease Control
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In October 2024, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released the findings from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which included the first nationally-representative report on adverse childlhood experiences (ACEs) reported by children instead of adults.
 
Who Did This?
Senior author was Phyllis Holditch Niolon, PhD, the senior advisor for ACEs in the Division of Violence Prevention at CDC. She coordinates the Division's work on prevention of ACEs, and has published approximately eight papers promoting ACEs.
First author, Elizabeth Swedo, MD, is a pediatrician who works in the Division.
 
The Premise
The ACE data were gathered from 17,838 students in grades 9-12 with self-report surveys. The YRBS is administered every two years. The 2023 version was the first national survey asking children to self-report on ACEs. Items covered eight of the 10 original ACE items:

1. Emotional abuse
2. Physical abuse
3. Sexual abuse
4. Physical neglect
5. Witnessed intimate partner violence
6. Household substance use
7. Household poor mental health
8. Incarcerated or detained parent or guardian

 
(9) Emotional neglect and (10) Divorce / abandoned by parent were not asked.
 
The authors found the usual finding that has been found in dozens of prior ACE studies that a higher number of ACEs correlates with increased poor health outcomes, such as substance abuse, obesity, feelings of sadness, and thoughts of suicide. Correlations were also found with “health risk behaviors,” including bringing a weapon to school, being in a physical fight, and sexually active with multiple people.
 
Analysis
Critical analysis of this survey raises several concerns. First, the most common ACE, emotional abuse was endorsed by the majority of children (61.5%). It is inconceivable that the majority of American children truly believe they are abused by their parents.
The wording of the survey question was “During your life, how often has a parent or other adult in your home insulted you or put you down?” Obviously, the wording of this question does not rise to the level of abnormally negative parenting that has malicious intent to children. This question could easily be endorsed when parents try too hard to coach children on sports, for example.
Many of the endorsements for emotional abuse and the other items are undoubtedly false positives, which would not be surprising. I recently published the first study to document that false positive endorsements of traumatic life events are common [1]. It is not a leap to think the same is true of non-traumatic, everyday stressful events. Self-reports must be verified by interviewers to be credible.
 
Second, surveys like this are now routinely given to children in schools. They carry the implied message that life experiences may be harmful, or else the government would not take the time to ask about them. These frequent surveys may be conditioning children with repetition to believe they may be fragile, which is contributing to the current misperception that a child mental health crisis exists. In addition to the eight ACE items, the survey for high school students asked about 53 other possibly harmful activities.

There are, however, no studies that measured health status prior to the experiences of ACEs. One hundred percent of ACE studies have been cross-sectional.
The far more likely explanation for the correlation of ACEs with physical diseases later in life is that bad things do not happen at random. Children who are placed in adverse situations by their parents likely have parents with genetic profiles that make them less competent at managing themselves and their children, and, in addition, predispose them to more physical and mental diseases. Parents pass these genetic profiles to their children, who are then more likely to develop physical and mental diseases for genetic reasons, not because of stressful childhood experiences. Authors of ACE studies almost never consider this possibility.
 
Why Did This Happen?
ACEs is part and parcel of the leftist progressive narrative of Fragilism, that the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor, and all poor outcomes of disadvantaged people in the world must be due to environmental causes, not genetics.
The only rationale the CDC can promote for collecting ACE data is that ACEs are harmful, and further, that ACEs can be prevented. If they cannot be prevented, there is no sensible reason to spend the time and money on repeatedly measuring them. The CDC report claimed, “Preventing ACEs is possible and achievable,” and they cited the CDC’s resource guide on prevention.
Despite the guide’s assurances, there are, however, no good data that ACEs—abuse, divorce, parents being incarcerated, parental mental disorders—can be prevented. Multiple commentaries from experts have demonstrated some backbone to speak out about the foolishness of screening people for ACE scores [2,3], one of which, oddly, included some of the authors of the CDC report [4].
 
References
[1} Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126. Free preprint here (publication #94).
[2] Anda RF, Porter LE, Brown DW (2020). Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 59(2):293−295; DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009.
[3] 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, DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708.
[4] Austin AE, Anderson KN, Goodson M, Niolon PH, Swedo EA, Terranella A, Bacon S. Screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Critical Appraisal. Pediatrics. 2024 Dec 1;154(6):e2024067307. DOI: 10.1542/peds.2024-067307.

Source: FEMA press release
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On February 6, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) issued a press release “offering free and confidential crisis counseling and mental health support” for residents impacted by Tropical Storm Helene.
 
Who Is Doing This?
FEMA routinely offers states the opportunity to apply for federal funding to disseminate their Crisis Counseling Program (CCP) following disasters.
 
The Premise
The federal government spends tens of millions of dollars annually on the CCP. In 2024, for example, those funds went to six states following Hurricane Helene. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, CCP awards to all states totaled $131.6 million. Following the World Trade Center Disaster in 2001, New York’s CCP allocation was $137 million.
 
The program began in 1974, when the U.S. Congress passed the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act which formalized a range of assistance programs (e.g., housing assistance, debris removal, and water pumping). 
For mental health, “The President is authorized to provide professional counseling services, including financial assistance to State or local agencies or private mental health organizations to provide such services or training of disaster workers, to victims of major disasters in order to relieve mental health problems caused or aggravated by such major disaster or its aftermath.”
FEMA delegated this to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). There are at least five major problems with the CCP program.
 
Analysis
1. The program is not intended for those who need clinical-level treatment. Even though the Stafford act allows licensed clinicians to treat psychiatric disorders, SAMHSA opted to invent a unique model of outreach, unsupported by any evidence, that prohibits such treatment [1]. The aim, strangely, was “to serve people responding normally to an abnormal experience” with the logic that this would somehow reduce stigma associated with mental health treatment. Accordingly, the program must hire non-licensed laypersons to comfort individuals in distress as a friend or neighbor might. 

​Survivors, however, are likely dumbfounded by this, being much more interested in basic needs of repairing homes, dealing with financial losses, and childcare.
3. It’s unclear why “people responding normally” need assistance. The program guidelines are clear that “the thrust of the Crisis Counseling Program since its inception has been to serve people responding normally to an abnormal experience.”  This, by definition, excludes those with PTSD, depression, and anxiety. If individuals are responding normally, why do they need crisis counseling?
4. It is impossible to evaluate the program. All contacts between crisis counselors and individuals are required to be anonymous in the effort to be sensitive to stigma. No screening instrument is used to assess systematically for distress.
The wisdom of this strategy has been challenged by Congress. In 1995 the FEMA Inspector General recommended that a program evaluation be conducted. In 2002, the Government Accountability Office recommended that again. In 2006, a special report from the Congressional Research Service lamented that “the actual effect of the program on health outcomes has not been demonstrated” because it has never been evaluated [2].
5. Evidence shows that disaster victims do not use crisis mental health programs. Even if SAMHSA had designed a robust program to provide real treatment in an accessible fashion, it wouldn’t matter. It has been documented in free treatment programs created following the 2001 World Trade Center disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2010 Queensland floods, if you build it, they will not come [3]. The Queensland program was the most comprehensive post-disaster outreach program ever devised. They treated fewer than 100 children and adolescents.
 
Millions of taxpayer dollars are spent every year on a program that is insulated from being audited because of anonymous contacts and lack of data collection. The CCP program is so flawed and badly implemented, it seems like a parody that was never intended to help anyone truly in need.
I have sent this information to nearly every new FEMA and SAMHSA director since my personal experience in Hurricane Katrina. None of them have acted. It is time for the Department of Government Efficiency to use the chainsaw.


References
​[1] Robeznieks A (August 26, 2015). Fed dollars to address mental health issues post-Katrina may have been wasted: psychiatrist. Modern Healthcare.
[2] Sundararaman R, Lister S, Williams E. (2006) Gulf Coast hurricanes: Addressing survivors' mental health and substance abuse treatment needs. Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress; November 29, 2006. RL33738.
[3] Scheeringa MS, Cobham VE, McDermott B (2014).  Policy and administrative issues for large-scale clinical interventions following disasters. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology 24(1), 39-46, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2013.0067.

Source: KHON 2 news
Read time: 1.5 minutes, plus 51-second video
 
This Happened
In October 2024, Honolulu city government unveiled a plan to address homelessness with neuroscience-backed architecture.
 
Who Did This?
The architect hired to create the housing units is Ma Ry Kim. She is the CEO of B+HARI (Brain Health Applied Research Institute), which she co-founded in 2020 with a neurologist to design groundbreaking spaces that merge “cutting-edge neuroscience” and architecture to support cognitive resilience and brain health.
The city of Honolulu is spending $700,000 to renovate a warehouse, creating fourteen individual units of housing. The program is being operated by The Institute for Human Services, Inc., a non-profit in Hawai′i focused exclusively on ending homelessness. The state of Hawai′i will fund the operating costs, expected to cost between $1.5 and $2 million a year.
 
The Premise
Hailed as a “revolutionary city-state program” by the media, placement of homeless individuals in unique individual housing units will rewire their brains to help them heal. According to KHON 2 reporting, “Architect Ma Ry Kim designed the space using neuroscience research on how the brain heals from the trauma of homelessness.” The 51-second video below, by KHON 2, shows Kim explaining how it works.

​Analysis
There is no prior experience with this housing program that could provide evidence that this will work. The neuroscience behind the program was neither explained nor referenced. It is unclear what homeless individuals need to heal from but it has something to do with “trauma recovery.” It is unclear how healing from trauma will end their homelessness. It is unclear how living in units with four zones on a spectrum of public versus private space will rewire their brains.
 
Why Is This Happening?
This program is typical of the utopian Leftist project of the past one hundred years in America which believes that an administrative state can and should rule by science to eliminate all human suffering. Usually, the State makes a perfunctory attempt to provide the science background for its grandiose projects, but in this case, the manipulation of human plasticity, evidence from neuroscience, and rewiring brains were simply asserted.
 
This program is activism based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals which places care for the disadvantaged over all other moral concerns (such as tradition, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty). They assert 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. That is a false certainty that leads nowhere good, and is doomed to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on a plan that is guaranteed to fail.

Source: The University Star
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
Starting September 1, 2024, to be eligible for a state contract in Texas, a family violence shelter must use a trauma-informed service delivery model.
 
Who Did This?
The main sponsor of the bill was Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat who has served in the Texas House or Senate nearly continuously since 1981. The other four co-sponsors were three Democrats and one Republican.
 
The Premise
Family violence agencies are typically known primarily as shelters for domestic violence victims in times of crisis. Certain aspects of how they must operate have been regulated by Texas code to receive state funding. Senate bill 1841, which was passed in 2023, amended a section of the Texas code to require these services:

• Advocacy focused on physical, behavioral, and mental health
• Safety planning services
• Community education regarding family violence and family violence prevention efforts
• Counseling services

 
The bill also slipped in a stipulation that a shelter must “demonstrate that the center is using a voluntary and trauma-informed advocacy service model that respects an individual's needs.”
 
What is a trauma-informed advocacy service model? The bill defined it as the service “is provided in a manner that recognizes and responds to the signs and symptoms of trauma in, and the risks of trauma to, a victim of family violence to better support the victim and promote the victim's choice, trust, dignity, connection, and healing.”
 
Analysis
Why was the phrase “trauma-informed” inserted into the bill? During brief testimony for the bill in the Criminal Justice Committee of the Senate, Hinojosa described the bill as simply a modernization of law that had not been updated in fifteen years. Hinojosa mentioned the trauma-informed model as almost an afterthought at the end of his remarks.
Providing testimony were a director of a shelter and a former client who survived domestic violence. Neither mentioned trauma-informed care. No evidence was provided that some shelters were not providing the services in the bill.
 
Contrary to the testimony about the bill, the language of trauma-informed represents a specific social agenda that has little to do with trauma or with appropriate services. The definition of trauma used in psychiatry for diagnosis and research on posttraumatic stress disorder is that an event must rise to the level of life-threatening. Episodes of domestic violence almost always rise to this level. Shelters have de facto always operated on a model of dealing with physical and psychological trauma. So, it may seem confusing about why a law was needed to add trauma-informed language.

Despite gaining traction in the U.S., Europe, and Australia for the past twenty-five years, there is no evidence that trauma-informed practices improve effectiveness (see here).
The services required in the new law have been staples of shelter services for decades and represent nothing revolutionary. The concern is that the new law creates a formal link to the trauma-informed concept, which has a much wider and disturbing agenda. What usually happens in these situations is that many shelters will scramble to document how they have transformed themselves into being trauma-informed. They will require their staff to participate in trauma-informed workshops provided, for a fee, by outside consultants who travel the country. 

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.