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. |
|
|
Attempting to usurp the parent role, this law could become the most destructive of all the leftist progressive projects. But that’s not the only reason it’s a stupid idea. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Psychologist Dana Weiner, PhD Source: Office of the Governor of Illinois news release Read time: 2.3 minutes This Happened In July 2025, Illinois became the first state in the nation to mandate universal screening for mental health in schools. Who Did This? Psychologist Dana Weiner, PhD leads the initiative. She was appointed the Chief Officer for the Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation in March 2022. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, a progressive think tank focused on child welfare. The Premise The passage of Illinois Senate Bill 1560 sets the following timeline: By September 1, 2026, the State Board of Education, guided by the Governor’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Team, must publish the materials and procedures for phased implementation. These must cover opt-out provisions, confidentiality and privacy, family communication, data safety, and follow-up care. Starting in the 2027–2028 school year, all public school districts must offer annual mental health screenings to all students in grades 3–12. Analysis Illinois SB1560 is being sold as a bold step toward solving the so-called “youth mental health crisis,” but in reality it is a misguided policy destined to create more harm than good. The project raises multiple serious concerns: 1. If you’re a parent and concerned about your child’s mental health, why don’t you get your own assessment? Why would you be waiting on an annual school screen? Here’s how it likely will actually work. Competent parents will opt out. But parents who do not opt out and believe this project will magically get help for their children, are likely the same parents who have been unwilling to get help for their children on their own initiative. A school counselor cannot, and should not, unilaterally refer children to providers. 2. Research is clear that self-report surveys are riddled with flaws. These instruments routinely generate high false-positive rates [1]. Healthy children will be flagged for clinical referral because of normative unhappiness or fluctuations in mood or stress. 3. These children are a non-help seeking population. Many of them will see through the absurdity of the exercise, or rightfully resent it, and provide false answers on the surveys. The database will be riddled with invalid data. 4. Once thousands of new “cases” are generated, the already overstretched school counselors and psychologists will be buried under an impossible workload. An investigative report in 2023 documented that Illinois’ existing non-school screening program, which is much smaller than the planned school screenings, is already unable to link referrals to clinical care [2]. 5. The collection and storage of highly sensitive personal information raises enormous privacy concerns. Who will see this data? How will it be shared? How are teachers—a profession not focused on health care—to guard children’s privacy? When this concern was raised in the planning stage last year, Weiner’s team brushed it off with an assurance that they will have policies in place.
These ideological projects put into practice the arrogant claim that institutions know better than families, rooted in progressivism’s eternal folly that enlightened self-interest—not the empirically-proven moral commitments of family, tribe, and tradition—is the path to collective happiness.
This project is possibly more destructive than the other progressive projects because it appears more moderate than the controversial CRT, DEI, and transgender projects in schools. Once implemented, however, universal screening will perpetuate the myth of a child mental health crisis, the notion that humans are highly fragile, and provide a launch point for a world of possibilities for state intervention, invasion of privacy, and an expanded welfare state. 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 35(6):347-352. DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126. [2] Karp S, Schorsch K (March 11, 2023). Illinois lifeline program for suicidal kids struggles amid a youth mental health crisis, staffing shortages. Chicago Sun Times. A special issue collection of articles warns against the dangers of ideological capture, and calls for social work education to reclaim evidence, ethics, and genuine critical thinking. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Vicki Lens, Editor-in-Chief Source: Journal of Teaching in Social Work Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened In March 2025, the Journal of Teaching in Social Work published a special issue devoted to critiquing the woke hegemony in the training of new social workers. Who Did This? Vicki Lens is the editor-in-chief of the journal, and is Professor in the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, New York. Her work has focused on critiquing welfare reforms and analyzing court decisions related to welfare. Naomi Farber and Maryah Fram joined Lens as guest editors to put together this issue. Both are professors in schools of social work. The Premise The catalyst for the special issue was the very public reactions to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, which included a disproportionate number of social work students and faculty signing petitions and joining protests that refused to condemn terrorism and viewed Hamas’ actions as ‘valorized violence in the name of antiracist practice.’ This raised a concern that the social work profession was degraded in ‘a coalescing of what we have been observing for some time, that perhaps from impatience and frustration with the stickiness of entrenched social problems, our profession has gradually been letting go of the necessary burdens of the humbling search for professional and scientific knowledge.’ [1] A contributory factor was that in 2022 the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) decreed that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) must be taught throughout all social work curricula.
Authors described consequences such as student self-censorship. Indeed, two of the papers were anonymously-authored for fear of reprisals, reminiscent of eighteenth-century European autocracies where dissidents often published under pseudonyms to avoid imprisonment or exile.
Other essays explored the politicization of language, the pitfalls of DEI rhetoric, and the displacement of scientific inquiry by postmodern frameworks. At stake, contributors argued, is the profession’s ability to balance values of justice with commitments to evidence and client well-being. Collectively, the issue called for humility, pluralism, and a recommitment to rigorous, open, and diverse scholarship that resists ideological capture and safeguards social work’s mission to enhance human well-being. Analysis Exactly for these reason, clinical work and research on trauma has been another direct victim of this ideological capture of social work. The concerns raised in this special issue help explain how certain trauma-related concepts gained extraordinary influence despite weak empirical grounding. Within a professional culture that privileges moral certainty over methodological skepticism, ideas such as “the body keeps the score,” toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), complex PTSD, and epigenetic intergenerational transmission of trauma flourished as predetermined narratives despite the lack of evidence. Each offered an intuitive, emotionally resonant story: that trauma operates as an insidious oppressive force that indelibly imprints on the body, poisons development, or echoes through generations. Social workers constitute approximately 60% of the psychotherapist workforce. Their voices dominate the narratives in clinics, workshops, influencer videos, and online comments about the impact of trauma and how to treat it. When critical perspectives are silenced, clinicians and educators may adopt concepts that align with prevailing activist or moral frameworks, rewarding dramatic language over cautious science. Students trained in such environments are less likely to challenge weak evidence, while practitioners may apply these ideas unquestioningly, shaping interventions and policies around them. Thus, the professional drift toward rigid ideological mandates not only undermines academic freedom, but also creates fertile ground for the proliferation of trauma “hype concepts” that captivate the imagination while evading empirical accountability. References [1] Lens V, Farber N, Fram M (2025). Editorial. Journal of Teaching in Social Work 45(2):179-197. DOI 10.1080/08841233.2025.2472491. Fear, emotional fragility, and empathy are the new classroom staples. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Carteret Elementary training Source: Essex News Daily Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened On June 2, 2025, teachers at Carteret Elementary School in Bloomfield, NJ attended a workshop to be trained in “trauma-informed teaching.” Who Did This? The workshop was led by Guidance Counselor Marissa Acosta and special education teacher Beth Armstrong. Funding for the workshop and subsequent implementation of the skills is provided by a state grant. The Premise The premise of the training is that emotional trauma experienced outside the classroom may affect a child’s performance in the classroom. Teachers must be taught to:
Analysis The concepts taught were true to the trauma-informed ideology which posits that individuals who have experienced trauma can be distressed when re-triggered by insensitive behaviors when they try to obtain routine services in society. Their distress is so disabling that it prevents them from getting education, medical care, mental health care, and every other service that involves the interaction of a consumer with a live human [1,2]. These types of trainings in education settings raise at least two concerns. First, there is no evidence that therapized teachers projecting more empathy than they already naturally show can have a substantial impact on trauma child victims. Second, this training promotes a model of educator-student relationships that risks overstepping traditional professional boundaries by encouraging teachers to assume roles more appropriately held by parents. Critics have raised similar concerns in the context of transgender-affirming and DEI programming, where educators are seen as inappropriately displacing parental influence. Worse, these ideological shifts occur without meaningful parental knowledge or consent. These types of workshops train teachers to foster in children an identity that they are highly fragile, and instill an identity in teachers that they are savior-replacements for incompetent parents in the emotional lives of children and serve as essential barriers to protect children from an imagined, haunting specter of oppression in society. Why Is This Happening? The motivations of the trauma-informed movement have puzzled many people since the movement was launched out of nowhere in 2001 (see here and here). It was devoid of any empirical basis and had no constituency calling for it.
Being a movement rather than an evidence-based public health issue, trauma-informed trainings have become a way to group diverse domains under a common term to the end of shaping political objectives. Trauma-informed approaches are meant for any type of social agency, medical practice, and perhaps any business that must interact with consumers. These trainings are the new version of ‘party cells’ for organizing at the grassroots level that were common in the Communist Party in the early twentieth century. The aim is to reframe the social contract between humans and community structures based on the premise that humans can be made dysfunctional through oppression. The revolutionary remedy is widespread reforms of therapized empathy in consumer interactions to guide them back to a utopian path of perfectibility. Nothing good has ever come from a societal praxis of this sort of vision. This falsely divides the world into oppressed and oppressor. Victims are coached to be endlessly fragile. Non-victims have their freedoms intruded upon to cater to the victim’s special rights. It enables dependency of a subset of free riders who are more than willing to take advantage of others’ compassion and reduces their incentive to flourish through their own initiatives. References [1] Harris M and Fallot RD (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 [2] SAMHSA, (2014). 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. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Kendra Gage, executive director, Hulitan Family & Community Services Society Source: Parksville Qualicum Beach News Read time: 1.9 minutes This Happened In September 2024, a non-profit organization in Canada opened an indigenous-specific trauma-informed daycare center. Who Did This? Hulitan Family & Community Services Society is a non-profit based in Victoria, British Columbia. Their mission is to help Indigenous families heal from the damage of colonization and develop resilience through culturally-rooted programs. Services include counseling and supports to reunite children with families, and prevent children from being placed in out-of-home care. Their website opens with a land acknowledgment. At least half of their $2.2 million (Canadian) budget (approximately $1.6 million U.S.) is funded by the Canadian government. The executive director, Kendra Gage, has been with the non-profit for over twenty years. The Premise Their annual report described the daycare services as having spaces for 24 infant-toddlers and 24 three-to-five-year-old children, providing space for parent workshops, and “…the centre, classrooms, toys, books, and outdoor spaces will be reflective of Indigenous cultures so that children and their families can see themselves reflected in the environment around them, supporting a sense of belonging.” A local news report described the specific trauma-informed practices as:
Analysis The ‘trauma’ these children experienced differs from the psychiatric definition of trauma used for defining and researching post-traumatic stress reactions which is that events must involve life-threat. Rather, it is assumed that any indigenous child has experienced ‘trauma’ by nature of being indigenous through historical trauma or perceived discrimination in current society.
There is no clear and consistent definition of what counts as trauma-informed practice, so, the definition can be almost whatever each program wants, such as asserting that wood furniture and sea foam color have healing properties. Reviews of trauma-informed practices have demonstrated there are no high-quality studies and no evidence that they work (see here). Why Is This Happening? This is one of dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of projects branding themselves as trauma-informed in the past decade. The label ‘trauma-informed’ provides an imprimatur of scientific authenticity but it has no evidence-based meaning. The leaders of these projects do not seem to care about research evidence. The purpose is to leverage the concept that trauma has been miraculously discovered as the cause of all disadvantaged groups in society. This daycare represents another example of how so-called trauma-informed practices are manifesting in support services, architecture design, education, medicine, addiction, and courts.
Their concept of trauma is baffling and the meaning of trauma-informed practices is vague. These attempts to control language are purposeful attempts to install a false intellectual framework (see here); the more confusing they are, the more complex it seems, the harder it is to grasp, but it gives the impression there must be some basis of truth to their premise. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Cover of the 70-page CorruptED report Source: Parents Defending Education Read time: 1.7 minutes This Happened On August 28, 2024, a report was issued that reviewed syllabi of college courses for future teachers across the nation which exposed the radical ideologies being taught. Who Did This? Parents Defending Education produced the report. The organization website describes itself as “a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.” The Premise The report, CorruptED: Colleges of Education and the Teacher As Activist Pipeline, examined 110 syllabi and 53 course descriptions from over 50 universities and colleges. The purpose was to document guiding principles being taught to the next generation of teachers which included radical left-wing ideologies. Organized by state, university or college, and course title, the report was narrative in style, listing specific phrases of course content. Oft-repeated topics included:
Analysis What is the connection to trauma? Multiple courses that taught these progressive views included trauma as another source of unequal and unfair form of oppression. Their definition of trauma, however, was from a distorted reality. Discrimination, whether real or perceived, is viewed as trauma. Because certain groups suffer discrimination as “trauma,” the remedy is implementation of trauma-informed classrooms. While the other topics of woke ideology get all the attention, many may not yet have realized how the leveraging of trauma over the past thirty years is part of the same movement. The psychiatric concept of trauma is a victim of its own success. The designation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980 and the following explosion of research to validate the disorder and develop effective treatments is one of the great success stories of psychiatry. Part of the success of PTSD research has been to show that the development of PTSD is always limited to experiences of life-threat because those are the types of sudden, unexpected, overwhelming moments of panic and fear for one’s life that causes the syndrome with true functional impairment. Experiences that do not rise to that level may be stressful and cause other problems, but they do not cause PTSD. It seems to have been inevitable that any social justice cause that sought status worthy of political action would claim their unique situation of social stress was trauma. Hence, nearly every form of perceived or real oppression is now being exaggerated as trauma in the progressive vision. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Cade Brumley, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Source: Louisiana Department of Education Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened On July 29, 2024, the top administrator of a state education department issued a memo to district school leaders to promote stricter school discipline consistent with two new state laws. Who Did This? Cade Brumley is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education. He was selected in 2020 by a state board under a Democrat governor. In 2024, the governorship changed to a Republican, who, with majorities in the House and Senate, passed multiple laws to return to conservative cultural values in education and law enforcement. The Premise Brumley’s memo stated, “As we approach a new school year, please recommit to assertive discipline action to create safe and orderly environments where teaching and learning can flourish.” It also noted two new laws. One law replaces the phrase a “teacher may” have an unruly student removed from the classroom with a “teacher shall,” and protects teachers who do that from retaliation by school leaders. The other new law adds possession of knives and illegal drugs to behaviors requiring expulsion. Not mentioned in the memo is that the competing philosophy of assertive discipline in schools has been the practice of restorative justice. Developed in part as a response to zero-tolerance school policies of the 1990s, restorative justice advocates claim that suspensions facilitate a path to prison, and that punitive discipline is inherently racist because it is disproportionately given to Black students and minority groups due to structural racism and implicit bias [1]. Originally crafted for the criminal justice system, restorative justice does not have one standard definition. Common elements include emphasis on communication in face-to-face circles, often called peace circles, where victims express how the “deeds” effected them, and perpetrators, gently referred to as “doers,” take responsibility for their actions in apologies or service work. It must never be implied that the doer is a bad person [2]. At least three states passed laws (California, Colorado, and Minnesota) to make restorative justice government policy in public schools in the past decade. Many school districts have adopted it, including Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco [2]. Analysis To some in the criminal justice system, trauma is a guiding loadstar: victims of violence should not be re-traumatized by being forced to testify in formal proceedings, and perpetrators should not be newly traumatized by incarceration. Psychiatrist Judith Herman, inventor of the fictitious complex PTSD, devoted her latest book in 2023 to promoting restorative justice [3]. In the school system, negative impacts on perpetrators and victims are called “harms” instead of traumas. The emphasis is more on trying to correct perceived racial discrimination and reduce discipline disparities. Louisiana never formally adopted restorative justice in schools. An effort to enshrine the practice into code failed in 2013 in large part because there is no good evidence to suggest that it works. Only one study on restorative justice in schools has employed a randomized design, and had mixed results on suspension rates, and showed that academic outcomes actually worsened in grades 6–8 [2]. One other study employed a randomized design but it was narrowly focused on bullying, and failed to show an overall effect [4]. Both studies suffered from inconsistent implementation practices that may have weakened the effects. All other research in schools are uncontrolled studies [5]. Advocates can point to decreased suspensions in some, but not all, studies, but usually neglect to mention how that is circular. Suspensions decrease simply because restorative justice eliminates suspensions as a first response. Nearly all studies failed to measure underlying disruptive behaviors. The main evidence that advocates of restorative justice can cite is that teachers’ or students’ perceptions of school atmosphere improve, although even that is mixed. Further, perceptions don’t make anyone safer, develop academic skills, or improve lives in tangible ways. Why Is This Happening? Returning to assertive discipline may be seen as a correction to social justice types of reforms based on claims that racism causes children to be disruptive. For social justice movements to both energize the elites in power and create public buy-in, the time-tested progressive Leftist strategy is to identify a source of perceived oppression that is the cause of all problems, the thing one can point to with definitive clarity as the cause of all disadvantages and inequities in society. Trauma and racial discrimination consistently serve that purpose well. Evidence of causation has been harder to come by. REFERENCES [1] Gregory, A., & Evans, K.R. (2020). The Starts and Stumbles of Restorative Justice in Education: Where Do We Go from Here? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/restorative-justice [2] Catherine H. Augustine, John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, Andrea A. Joseph (2018). Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. RAND Corporation: Santa Monica, CA. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2840.html [3] Judith Herman (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. Basic Books: New York [4] Acosta, J., Chinman, M., Ebener, P.,Malone, P. S., Phillips, A.,& Wilks, A. (2019). Evaluation of a whole-school change intervention: findings from a two-year cluster-randomized trial of the restorative practices intervention. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48, 876–890. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01013-2. [5] Studies are reviewed in: Sean Darling-Hammond, Trevor A. Fronius, Hannah Sutherland, Sarah Guckenburg, Anthony Petrosino, Nancy Hurley (2020). Effectiveness of Restorative Justice in US K-12 Schools: a Review of Quantitative Research. Contemporary School Psychology (2020) 24:295–308. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40688-020-00290-0 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Federal bill aims to add trauma-informed practices to Lyndon Johnson’s still-expanding Great Society8/8/2024
CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) Source: Congress.gov Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On July 11, 2024, text became available for bill H.R. 8526 – Trauma-Informed Schools Act of 2024. It was introduced into the House of Representatives on May 23, 2024 and referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Who Did This? Katherine M. Clark is a Democrat representative from Massachusetts. As the minority Whip, she currently is the highest-ranking woman in Congressional leadership. The Premise H.R. 8526 proposes to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to mandate trauma-informed practices in schools. The bill has not moved out of committee. Specifically, it proposes to insert a definition of trauma-informed practices: a “shared understanding among teachers,… school leaders,… and other staff that— ‘‘(i) adverse and potentially traumatic experiences are common among students; (ii) trauma can impact student learning, behavior, and relationships in school.” The bill aims to implement three practices:
The rest of the bill contains details on amending the application process for federal funding. To receive funding, eligible schools (those with a high proportion of at-risk students) must submit applications with implementation plans to local school agencies, who must submit plans to state agencies, who must submit plans to the federal government. Thus, every level of education bureaucracy would include mandates to implement trauma-informed practices. Analysis The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society aimed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice by greatly expanding the federal government’s control of health care, education, and welfare programs. H.R. 8526 continues that progressive leftist tradition by adding trauma as another domain for federal intervention. Consistent with other definitions of trauma-informed practices, the definition in the bill is enormously broad and includes “adverse” experiences that are everyday stresses, not life-threatening trauma. This allows governmental control of language that redefines any perceived inequity in society as a more pernicious threat of psychological harm than it really is. Trauma-informed trainings are not balanced presentations of scientific evidence (see here and here). They are biased to present a liberal theory that human nature is highly malleable via the hypotheses of toxic stress—that trauma permanently damages brains—and the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) literature—that early childhood common stressors cause a huge variety of physical illnesses in adulthood. These hypotheses have been debunked as lacking credible evidence (debunked here and here). The definition of trauma-informed in the bill is revealing for its intent by the bill’s sponsors to primarily create a “shared understanding.” The intent is not to educate educators and students on the research of what we know about human nature and our response to trauma, it is to enthrone a fabricated sense of reality that the science is settled in support of their theory. Implicit bias increased in popularity in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of DEI, with the assertion that Whites were systemically racist even if they didn’t know it. The psychological research trying to establish implicit bias as a real construct, however, has received severe criticisms. Social emotional learning may be considered the child development version of implicit bias. It is promoted as a curriculum for teaching children how to access an emotion vocabulary and develop adaptive social behaviors, but teaches that these are tools for examining root causes of inequity. It has been criticized as a Trojan horse for introducing Critical Theory and a meta-analysis of 90 programs found no evidence of a beneficial effect six months after programs ended [1]. Why Is This Happening? The trauma-informed practices movement has made inroads with courts and local government policies, but it has found the greatest traction in local educational settings [here, here, and here]. This bill represents an attempt to expand a foothold into the federal educational level. The bill is written as an intention to improve child outcomes through science, but there are zero research studies showing that trauma-informed practices improve any outcomes for children. If implemented, the only thing the bill would ultimately achieve is embedding in federal law, with all the infrastructure and funding that entails, the permanent training of educational staff and students in an unproven ideology. REFERENCES [1] Cipriano C, Ha C, Wood M, Sehgal K, Ahmad E, McCarthy MF (2024). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Universal School-Based SEL Programs in the United States: Considerations for Marginalized Students. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 100029, doi: 10.1016/j.sel.2024.100029 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Left: David Colley, PhD, Oxford Brookes University. Right: Laura Dennis, Education Outreach Lead, Mulberry Bush Source: Oxford Mail Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On June 20, 2024, the Mulberry Bush charity sponsored a one-day conference on ways to address childhood trauma in schools. Who Did This? Mulberry Bush, a 75-year-old charity based in Standlake, UK, conducts trainings and runs a residential school of about 20 students, ages 5 to 12, who have suffered some form of trauma. Laura Dennis, a former school teacher, is the Education Outreach Lead. The university co-host was Oxford Brookes University, led by David Colley, PhD, in the School of Education. Colley has published several papers supportive of nurture groups in schools. The Premise This Research Conference goal was to disseminate the findings from several projects that have attempted to embed trauma and attachment training in UK schools.
Analysis This conference is an example of how the trauma-informed approaches movement is not just popular in the US. It also has strong footholds in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Australia, and perhaps other countries. The most well-developed of the programs in the conference is the nurture group model, which was developed in the 1970s and is now implemented in over 2,000 schools in the UK [1].
This model shares similarities with some American models of supporting troubled children, but there are no known nurture groups in the US. NurtureUK, a charity for promoting the nurture group model, released a report in 2019 stating that more than 100 studies have found positive effects from nurture groups. The model was hailed as a tremendously successful program that likely pays for itself after just two years. A literature review in 2014, however, found only twelve outcomes studies [2] which had multiple major limitations. None of the studies were randomized. As such, no studies had outcomes measured with blind raters. While some behaviors improved, no studies found improvements in academic tests. There is no known financial analysis that shows that nurture groups pay for themselves. Only one study had a follow-up that measured outcomes beyond the end of a school year. Researchers re-assessed children a mean of 2.7 years after the group ended, but they managed to follow only 12 of the 68 children who started the study. These children did not significantly improve on 16 of 20 domains that were tested [3]. The training for teachers in this model shares a common goal with the other trauma-informed approaches of instilling a culture in the belief of a misleading narrative of neuroscience that has been debunked. They embrace the toxic stress narrative that prolonged stress becomes toxic, and high levels of cortisol “can impact the developing brain and alter the structure and function of key brain areas” [1]. REFERENCES [1] Nurture Groups (booklet) (2019). Published by NurtureUK, https://www.nurtureuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Nurture-Groups-Booklet-Dec-2019.pdf [2] Naomi Katherine Hughes & Annette Schlösser (2014) The effectiveness of nurture groups: a systematic review, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 19:4, 386-409, DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2014.883729 [3] O’Connor, T., and J. Colwell. 2002. The Effectiveness and Rationale of the ‘Nurture Group’ Approach to Helping Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties Remain Within Mainstream Education. British Journal of Special Education 29 (2): 96–100. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, PhD Source: Arizona State University News Read time: 2.0 minutes This Happened On June 4, Arizona State University held a virtual, all-day conference for educators called the Trauma-Sensitive School Symposium. Who Did This? The organizer was Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, associate professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics. She holds a PhD in public health. Johnson has been first or secondary author on over 80 peer-reviewed publications that focused on school climate, trauma-informed practices, and bullying. The Premise The trauma-informed movement advocates a wide range of loosely-defined concepts. The goals for this conference included recognizing the signs of trauma, implementing culturally responsive interventions, and creating compassionate spaces for student well-being. Common to all efforts in the movement is a framework that there is almost always a reason for a person’s behavior—there are no inherent traits of dysfunction—and the reason is usually trauma. This was the eighth conference in the Arizona State series. In 2023, the conference was attended by over 700 educators. Lindstrom Johnson is one of many scientist advocates supported by their universities who are aggressively promoting the trauma-informed ideology. Analysis Because the trauma-informed concept is a list of practices that cover so many different and loosely-defined things, it does not represent a standardized or coherent technique, which makes it nearly impossible to study. The key underlying premise of trauma-informed trainings is always to install an intellectual framework more than it is to recommend specific tasks. The framework is to convince participants that trauma has impacts on everyone—children, families, teachers–and the impacts are wide-ranging across physical health, mental health, and ability to function in daily life. If you remove evidence-based psychotherapy treatment for PTSD, which was supported by research well before the trauma-informed movement started, from the list of practices, there are no research studies that show trauma-informed practices can improve any outcomes of substance. Even reviews that are sympathetic to the movement acknowledge the absence of evidence. For example, a recent review of trauma-informed practices in healthcare concluded, “Our first important finding is that the empirical evidence base for the effectiveness of trauma-informed organisational change interventions in primary care and community mental healthcare is very limited” [1]. Why Is This Happening? Postmodern activists' attempts to leverage the concept of trauma as an oppressive force that determines all the disadvantaged groups in society has been operational for nearly thirty years. This trauma paradigm arose from psychologist- and psychiatrist-activists and then found traction in social work and counselor training programs that are focused on social justice. This trauma ideology expanded outside of psychology at the same time as popularity rose for other progressive movements such as critical race theory, DEI, and transgenderism. They all share an underlying reframing of human nature as fragile and highly malleable. Attendees at these types of conferences tend to be a subgroup of progressive educators who wish to redefine the traditional role of teachers. They believe children are fragile and need to be protected from every life challenge by teachers who take on mental health and auxiliary parenting duties. Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt described this phenomenon at the university level in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. Abigail Shrier described this at the elementary and high school level in her 2024 book Bad Therapy. Conservative activists like Christopher Rufo have taken action against progressive schools and have been at the forefront of dismantling woke policies in educational settings [2]. 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 Organizational Change Interventions", Health & Social Care in the Community, vol. 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/4475114 [2] Christopher F. Rufo (November 28, 2023). The Fight for New College. A short documentary on the counterrevolution in higher education. Substack. https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-fight-for-new-college Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, Director of Clinical Services, Paths for Families Source: Paths for Families press release Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened. Paths for Families, a nonprofit organization in Maryland, announced April 8, 2024 that it was awarded $770,000 by the state to implement trauma-informed services in Prince George’s County high schools. Who Did This? The funding comes from the Maryland General Assembly under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The Blueprint was a major piece of legislation passed in 2021 that made comprehensive changes to Maryland’s public education system that spans pre-K to high school, with a priority on diversity and equity of outcomes. Among other changes, it mandated access to mental health practitioners for students and professional development for school staff on how to provide trauma–informed interventions. Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, director of clinical services at Paths for Families, said “Our team has worked with populations in need of trauma-responsive care for more than three decades, so we're uniquely qualified to serve this critical community need.” The Premise In 2021, Maryland embarked on a massive plan for investing $3.8 billion over ten years to raise the quality of public education because various metrics showed mediocre performance, including large academic achievement gaps based on race and income [1]. One of the recommendations to elevate under-performing students was to institute “broad and sustained new academic, social service, and health supports for students and schools that need them the most,” which, to a large degree, meant trauma-informed care. The premise of this strategy is based on the belief that trauma is a source, perhaps the main source, of a vast array of mental and physical problems for dysfunctional individuals in society. The $770,000 funding to Paths for Families was for only one of Maryland’s twenty-three counties for just a 16-month period. Prince George’s is the second most populated county in the state. According to the press release, Paths for Families will provide evidence-based counseling to high school students living in foster care or with an adoptive parent. They will also conduct trauma-informed care trainings for teachers and staff at all 33 high schools in the county. Analysis The strategy to provide evidence-based counseling to high school students sounds potentially helpful, but there are a number of problems with these types of programs. Uptake and effectiveness are notoriously poor with counseling for youths and families who are not seeking it. Providing counseling to youths does not provide the same guarantee of benefits as providing medical care such as vaccinations, medications, eye care, and dental care. In addition, the counseling is likely to be school-based, on the grounds that this makes access easier for youths. There is, however, little to no data that shows school-based produces better, or even equal, uptake or results than office-based. Plus, it has the disadvantages of minimizing parental involvement and problematic issues of maintaining confidentiality for students. Further, there is zero good scientific evidence that treating trauma leads to remediation of learning problems or school achievement on a public health scale. Details of the training for teachers to be provided by Paths for Families were not listed, but if it is like all other trauma-informed trainings it will be based on the doctrines of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and toxic stress, which teach that stress and trauma permanently damage brains, cause a huge swath of physical diseases, and cause most of the problems of disadvantaged groups in society. Despite a consensus of a subgroup of medical and social sciences researchers who advocate for this ideology, none of the claims based on ACEs and toxic stress have been proven. The claims are based on poorly-designed cross-sectional studies and one-sided interpretations of data to fit their worldview. Why Is This Happening? Over the past decade, dozens of programs nearly identical to this have emerged over the country, mostly in counties and states controlled by progressive leftist legislators. They are based on an ideology that human nature is highly malleable from life experiences, which is the basis of a larger suite of progressive doctrines that attempt to explain disadvantages and minority groups as products of oppression which require government control and intervention. REFERENCES [1] Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education (December 2020). Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Final Report. Department of Legislative Services, Annapolis, MD. Accessed 5/10/2024. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. |
