Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
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CATEGORY: 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. Comments are closed.
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