New literature review: Can trauma-informed approaches help understand migrant’s psychological problems?

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Anita Burgund Isakov, PhD

Source: Trauma, Violence, & Abuse
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
Researchers conducted a literature review of 45 papers to examine how the concept of trauma-informed approaches (TIA) can apply to forced migrant families to improve services.
 
Who Did This?
Social worker Anita Burgund Isakov is an Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She has three first-author, and four secondary-author publications in the PsychInfo database. Her focus has been on foster care and family support services. This is her first paper focused on trauma.
 
The Claim
The aim of the literature review was “to understand the concept of trauma-informed approaches for migrant and refugee families.” From reading these papers, the authors extracted the following five topics on how TIAs have been applied:
(1) Experiences of migration. In addition to true life-threat trauma experiences, migrants also can experience economic insecurity, discrimination, lack of privacy in asylum centers, and challenges of assimilating into a new country.
(2) Conceptualization of trauma. Services must endeavor to convey greater understanding, respect, foster trust, be culturally-responsive, acknowledge intergenerational impacts, and strive for equity. This is the only way to be “genuinely healing” and “address the multiple layers of disparities” faced by migrants.
(3) Theoretical frameworks of TIA. Several theoretical frameworks have variously involved cultural humility, intersectionality of racial-based discriminations, and resilience.
(4) Approaches to trauma work. The authors asserted that cultural adaptations ought to be incorporated into psychotherapy techniques, but no studies have tested that.
(5) Programs and interventions to support families. Several training exercises have been used to instill cultural sensitivity into service providers.
 
Analysis
The data in the papers they reviewed was uninformative. There are no randomized trials of TIA. Only nine of the 45 studies involved quantitative data.
 
A method of analysis was lacking. There was no attempt to question the appropriateness or effectiveness of TIA. The review could make no definitive recommendations because nothing had been precisely defined or tested.
 
The more concerning flaws of the review, however, lie in two more pernicious defects:
(1) The aim of the review was flawed by circular reasoning. The usual scientific process is to gather data on a concept to demonstrate its validity. This review did the reverse. The authors reviewed papers that unquestioningly asserted the concept of TIA, and then concluded, of course, that the concept of TIA was vital. Critical thinking was absent. The authors ignored any benefits migrants might perceive from locating to more secure and free countries. 
(2) Verbiage was impossibly vague. The writing was an excess of words of trivial or vague content, typical of nearly every TIA publication. Deciphering a TIA manuscript is like deciphering hieroglyphics of a lost civilization, except that TIA jargon has never been coherent.
For example, the Discussion section concluded, “The intersection of different forms of oppression and discrimination, such as racism and migration status, is recognized by other authors as an important aspect of TIA to forced migrants as it recognizes the unique experiences of each individual (Bastia, 2014; Lee & Choi, 2022).” This lit review, however, did not establish an impact of oppression or discrimination, much less a combined impact. Being recognized by other authors is not a form of evidence. Recognizing the unique experiences of individuals is both inherent in any reasonable encounter and sufficiently vague to mean little.
 
Why Is This Happening?
A criticism of TIA is that, more than a decade after being invented out of thin air, the concept is still vague [1]. It should be obvious by now that being vague is the point, so that it can be whatever activists want for any occasion.

Trauma-informed approaches are unscientific because they can never be disproven as currently defined.

There will probably never be a randomized trial of trauma-informed approaches because nothing in TIA can be precisely standardized (see here].

TIA has never been an empirically-derived concept. It has always been a Leftist, neo-Marxist ideology that claims problems of human behavior are causal from severe oppression. TIA theory serves the crucial functions of asserting causation and maximal severity. For the ideology to change society as intended, the inequity outcomes must be greater so that the outrage must be greater, so that greater involvement of the State must be demanded. Victims don’t just need psychotherapy, they need all of society to accommodate them everywhere all the time, regardless of how it impinges on other rights and freedoms.
 
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References
[1] Mark Smith, Sebastian Monteux, and Claire Cameron (2021). Trauma: An ideology in search of evidence and its implications for the social in social welfare. Scottish Affairs 30(4):472–492 DOI: 10.3366/scot.2021.0385.