Source: Office of the Surgeon General
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In August 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory to draw immediate national attention to the mental health problems of parents.
 
Who Did This?
Vivek H. Murthy has served as the U.S. Surgeon General since 2021 when appointed by President Biden. He previously served in the same post 2013-2017 when appointed by President Obama. His medical training is in internal medicine. He has one research publication from 2004 when he was in training.
 
The Claim
This advisory (about 13 pages of text) asserted that mental health problems of parents in the U.S. are extreme, and worse, those are being passed down to their children. There is a long list of causes of mental stress that parents have always had to deal with, e.g., lack of sleep, finances, and worrying about children’s health. But now there are causes that previous generations did not have to consider—social media, influencers, the youth mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness—such that “success and fulfillment feel increasingly out of reach.”
Reversing this situation will take a combination of new government policies and programs plus culture change. He listed 34 action steps divided among government, employers, community organizations, and other groups.
 
Analysis
It is hard to reconcile Murthy’s assessment that parents are highly stressed with the fact that until the twentieth century parents have had to deal with far worse stress such as higher mortality for women during childbirth, higher death rates of children from diseases, unsafe working conditions, poverty, and uncertain food supply. Going even farther back in time they had to deal with basic survival issues, predators, frequent tribal warfare, and overall, much shorter life spans.
 
The only evidence Murthy cited that things are bad was that “41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” These data did not come from a research study. They came from a survey by Harris Polls.
 
Murthy never provided evidence, or even asserted, that parental mental health is worse now than in the past. The premise of an advisory is supposed to be that a new health problem has risen which requires national attention, but Murthy never made such a case.
 
His evidence that children are at high risk because of parental mental health problems was based almost entirely on the research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The ACE literature is, however, flawed, because it has been 100% cross-sectional and has nearly zero power to determine causal relations (debunked here).
 
Many of the 34 recommendations were simplistic platitudes that are not in dispute, such as sleep well, eat right, and “Connect with parents and caregivers in your life...” The quality of the report was low in terms of scientific rigor. It reads more like an undergraduate thesis than national policy guidance based on scientific consensus. No research was discussed in detail.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Murthy appears intent on being the Coddler in Chief of the nation’s mental health. A central premise was his unconventional claim that parents are vulnerable because they feel unappreciated by society. For example, “Many parents and caregivers feel undervalued for prioritizing parenting over employment...” Hence, many of his recommendations were for government, businesses, and communities to remunerate parents in various ways. This claim was contrary to most individuals’ experiences  because the value of being a parent has never been contingent on recognition from society. A truism of parenthood is that the love and special bond involved in raising children is the greatest joy in life.
This advisory follows a string of reports by Murthy with a similar theme that the U.S. population has reached an unprecedented stage of fragility, suffering from a wide range of new emotional and behavioral problems. His previous Surgeon General reports have included youth mental health, suicide prevention, youth violence, and loneliness. He seems to perceive the population as capable of being emotionally wounded by everyday stressors. This is consistent with a larger shift in the U.S. during the past decade driven by a portion of the population that implemented social emotional learning in K-12 schools, created campus cultures with safe spaces, protection from microaggressions, and fabricated moral panics over smartphones and eco-anxiety. This agenda reflects a biased intellectual framework about human nature and a utopian belief system that the role of government and society is to uplift humanity.
 
 
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written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
I wrote The Body Does Not Keep the Score (November 2024) because no one else had published a critical analysis of the claims made by Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score. Given the massive popularity of van der Kolk’s book (reviewed here), and the influence it has on clinical work and social policy, it was amazing that there had been almost no critical analysis of it. It has been one of the most popular books in the world for an amazing eight years and still going strong. My aim was to review the evidence as to whether his claims were true.
 
Book Summary
The majority of the 166 pages of text methodically reviews the evidence for 122 claims made in van der Kolk’s book, including 42 claims about neurobiology, 51 claims about treatments, and 29 claims about miscellaneous topics such as child development and memory. These analyses show that van der Kolk’s claims are wrong because he either misrepresented studies, cherry-picked studies that supported only his claims, or made jargon-filled vague statements with no supporting evidence.

Contrary to van der Kolk’s claims, I showed that the evidence indicates that any brain differences that exist between individuals with PTSD and those without PTSD pre-existed trauma experiences, and probably serve as vulnerability factors for developing PTSD. Also, the evidence does not support the notion that body-based treatments are superior. In fact, the evidence for his claims is thin to nonexistent.

​In addition, I addressed crucial topics that van der Kolk ignored. If his theory that trauma damages the brain is correct, what is the mechanism for causing damage? There is a massive amount of research on cortisol and epigenetics that he barely touched. The research on these topics has been unreplicable and far from convincing, which I addressed in a chapter on mechanisms. Also, if his theory that trauma damages the brain is not true, then what explains the research that shows brain differences in individuals with PTSD? He never considers the diathesis stress theory, which is far better supported than any other theory, which I addressed in a chapter on alternative theory.
The book includes 265 references for those who wish to consult original sources of the evidence.

My 2021 paper reviewed twenty-five pretrauma prospective studies showing that it is highly unlikely that trauma damages brains [1]. I am also the founder of Trauma Dispatch newsletter.

Beyond Neurobiology and Treatment Claims
The popularity of van der Volk’s book seems to be due far more to interest in van der Kolk’s neurobiological theory that “the body keeps the score” than to the claims about bodily-based treatments. My conclusions about this neurobiology theory run counter to the consensus in the field among researchers. How could I arrive at such different conclusions? This wrong consensus cannot be simply an honest mistake among very smart people. I addressed this in a chapter on ideology. The premise of van der Kolk’s theory is an ideology that genetics and heredity play no role in creating fixed behavioral traits in humans. His theory depends on human nature being highly malleable, which is appealing to many other aspects of a leftist progressive agenda that have proven extremely popular with a large portion of the population.

​In this sense, it seems that the popularity of van der Kolk’s book is also about him as a person. The stories of his fighting with psychiatric orthodoxy throughout his career make up a large part of his book. My analyses of this aspect, coupled with his ideological premises, show that The Body Keeps The Score has been popular not because it was about fact-based science, but because it was promoting a certain belief system.
 
 
REFERENCES
1. Scheeringa MS (2021) Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 30:e1864. doi: 10.1002/mpr.1864
 
 
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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:

• How whiteness operates and is maintained
• White privilege is not an opinion
• The book White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
• White supremacy
• White fragility
• Critical race theory
• Decolonization
• Systemic racism
• How to become anti-racist educators
• Intersectionality
• The 1619 Project
• How to interpret outcomes as oppressor versus oppressed
• How to identify micro- and macro-aggressions
• Writings of Karl Marx and Robin D’Angelo
• Examination of the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
• Social emotional learning
• Queer theory
• Teacher activism

 
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.

​ 
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Source: WHQR public media
Read time: 2.2 minutes

This Happened
On August 22, 2024, a one-day summit was held in Wilmington, North Carolina to educate staff of youth-serving organizations about ways to minimize or cope with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE).
 
Who Did This?
Youth of North Carolina, a non-profit organization, sponsored the summit. Their executive director, James Allegretto, joined the organization in 2022.
 
The Premise
The Youth Resilience Summit was advertised as “an exciting and informative day to discover how you can better minimize adverse childhood experiences and build resilience for our children.” The keynote speaker was retired basketball star Kenny Anderson. Speakers included the chief judge of the local court district (Independent) and the local district attorney (Democrat), referring to themselves as Batman and Robin while fighting for justice together for over 25 years. Also among the fifteen speakers was the current Democrat nominee for governor Josh Stein.
Eleven presentations were offered on topics including:

• How Positive Childhood Experiences can counteract adverse childhood experiences
• How social media algorithms can lead to crimes and trauma which can impact biology and mental health
• The five protective factors to create trauma-informed and compassionate communities

The summit concluded with a screening of the 2016 documentary Resilience, a staple in ACE events, which follows the rise in research and advocacy for ACEs.
 
The chief judge told a reporter that too many people cling to an old ‘tough-on-crime’ philosophy, whereas his aim is to identify the root causes of criminal behavior, which include adverse childhood experiences.
 
Analysis
No matter how you slice these types of events promoting ACEs, whether it’s negatively focused on the alleged harms or, like this one, positively focused on resilience, the foundational message is the same: Human minds are incredibly fragile to environmental psychological insults. The message is based on the belief that ACE research has established an incontrovertible fact that adverse experiences in childhood cause permanent harm in the forms of adult mental problems and physical illnesses.
The problem is that none of it is true. Adverse childhood experiences are associated with adult illnesses, but it is because bad things tend to travel together in life due to other shared factors. Childhood experiences do not cause these catastrophic outcomes.
 
While well-intentioned on humanitarian goals to help children, ACE programs are destined to fail. Trauma Dispatch documented some of the pushback against the ACE ideology and ACE screening here.
 
As the negative ACE message of catastrophic harms has grown a bit stale, the movement has been shifting to focus on resilience. Both messages are counterproductive for children. The harm message teaches children that they are incredibly fragile, and the resilience message teaches them that they are not naturally resilient. 

Why Is This Happening?
Allegretto was quoted as saying, “It almost feels like a movement, right? But the reality is that we discovered how adverse childhood experiences impact people two decades ago, and we're just now getting on board and making a difference.”
The movement is based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals that care for the disadvantaged trumps other moral concerns and that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences. Events like this promoting ACEs have been happening for the past fifteen years around the United States every week in the form of conferences, workshops, and professional development trainings. Trauma Dispatch has documented some of their content here, here, and here. It’s an attractive ideology to believe in because researchers have used slippery language to conflate association with causation, and because it appeals to the compassionate impulse to help the disadvantaged.
 
 
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Source: Congress.gov
Read time: 2.1 minutes
 
This Happened
On August 15, 2024, the text of a bill was made public that would amend an existing law to extend federal funding for trauma-informed programming in schools for five more years.
 
Who Did This?
The bill was sponsored by Jahana Hayes (D-CT). She was a public school teacher for fifteen years. Hayes was elected to her first term in Congress in 2019. She was a cosponsor of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in 2019 proposing a goal of 100% renewable energy; she introduced resolutions in Congress in 2020, 2023, and 2024 to declare racism a public health crisis; and she advocates for Israel to accept a cease fire deal with Hamas.
 
The Premise
HR 8981, the Supporting Trauma-Informed Education Practices Act, proposes to amend the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, which was passed in 2018 to stem the opioid drug crisis. The 2018 law created a sprawling set of new regulations that includes Medicaid and Medicare insurance coverage, FDA regulation, pharmacist duties, opioid addiction supports, workforce expansion, and public health education.
Funding for trauma-informed care in schools was folded into the public health section of the law on the  presumption that trauma was a driving force of substance abuse. It authorized $50 million per year for five years to fund grants to local agencies to implement the following:

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

The law also created an interagency task force of 28 federal agencies to formulate policy, determine best practices, and disseminate directives.
 
The funding for the trauma-informed care component was time-limited, originally authorized only for 2019 through 2023. The 2024 amendment seeks to re-authorize that for 2025 through 2029. It also adds a new mandate to provide mental health services to teachers and other school staff.
 
Hayes introduced the same legislation in 2022 but it was not voted on.
 
Analysis
Studies show that many individuals who abuse  substances have experienced childhood traumas, but these data come from cross-sectional studies that cannot determine causation. While some vulnerable individuals  who experience trauma may escalate their use of substances, blaming substance abuse on trauma may be overly simplistic.
 
Providing public education about trauma sounds innocent on face value, but as other posts showed (here and here), trauma-informed philosophy is a pandora’s box of ideology that ranges far beyond research evidence. It teaches people that they are highly vulnerable to brain damage and lifelong physical illness if they experience trauma, when the truth is that most people have no enduring symptoms following trauma. Trauma-informed trainings are focused on creating a cultural shift in how people think about human nature as nearly defenseless to oppressive experiences. The amendment mischaracterized the status of these issues by labeling the program “evidence-based” six times.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The 2018 law that created the original trauma-informed component was sponsored by a Republican representative and co-sponsored by ten Republicans and six Democrats, and it was approved by a majority of both parties. This was unusual since trauma-informed bills are typically offered by Democrats because the ideology is in harmony with the progressive leftist vision of human nature and an agenda to expand government entitlement programs. It seems likely that the national concern about the massive opioid epidemic in the United States lowered Republicans concerns about including the trauma-informed component as a relatively small part of the law.
As the epidemic has dragged on, however, under a Democrat president, Republican support for the component has disappeared. The 2024 amendment is sponsored exclusively by Democrats, failed once before in 2022, and seems unlikely to pass this year.
 
 
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Source: Psychological Science journal
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
A new study published this month was the first to test whether psychotherapy that addresses trauma in very young children can potentially prevent serious disease later in life by slowing down the aging of the body’s cells [1]. This kind of extraordinary claim tends to generate media interest. It was reported by at least one local, one national media outlet, and highlighted by the National Institutes of Health program that funded the work.
 
Who Did This?
Alexandra Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Intergenerational Developmental Health Program at the University of California San Francisco. The director of the project was psychologist Nicole R. Bush, who has first- or co-authored over 200 papers. They are both trying to prove how stressful life experiences become biologically embedded in physiology and epigenetics and cause health problems.
 
The Claim
The outcome variable in this study used an epigenetic age clock, which is based on measuring the number of methyl groups attached to DNA strands. Methylation occurs at cytosine-guanine pairs, called CpG sites. Certain regions, which tend to regulate DNA expression, are unmethylated. It is believed that methylation at these sites can function like an off switch to stop DNA expression. Most vertebrate DNA regions, however, are not regulation sites, and they are methylated in the natural state.
 
Researchers realized that methyl groups are lost and added to DNA over time due to wear and tear. Steve Horvath figured out that this happened systematically with age, and, in 2013, developed the first epigenetic age clock based on 353 CpG sites (193 increase with age, 160 decrease with age) [2]. When the clock calculates a person’s epigenetic age older than their chronological age, this is called “age acceleration,” allowing researchers to speculate that premature aging may have been caused by stressful experiences, which has downhill effects of illness or early death.

In the current study, Sullivan and colleagues used an epigenetic clock designed for children based on 94 CpGs. Participants were mother-child dyads exposed to trauma or grief recruited from a clinic. Children were 3-6-years old. Two cheek swabs were taken from 45 children at the baseline start of therapy and again ten months later. A comparison group of 110 children of similar age was drawn from a different study that did not involve treatment.
The two groups did not differ on age acceleration at baseline. The groups differed at the second time point, as the comparison group showed some age acceleration while the treated group showed significantly less age acceleration.
 
The authors concluded, “Findings provide robust, quasi-experimental support that dyadic intervention is associated with trauma-related accelerated aging biomarkers, most likely in a direction beneficial for health and development.”
 
Analysis
This was the first study of this type in children. One similar prior study, in adult combat veterans, did not show a slowing down of age acceleration after receiving treatment [3].
 
There are multiple concerns about methylation studies as an index of bodily damage. While more than a dozen studies, mostly in adults, have shown that epigenetic age acceleration consistently predicts PTSD status, all were cross-sectional and have zero power to prove causation. In addition, age acceleration has been found (inconsistently) with anxiety, autism, depression, schizophrenia and other conditions, suggesting it’s a non-specific index of vulnerability, like baseline heart rate variability, and is not unique to stress or trauma.
 
Another concern is that researchers don’t know if “age acceleration” in PTSD is maladaptive, or, being a misnomer, is an adaptive response. Epigenetics changes were not linked to any functional significance in this study. An alternative theory is that methylation changes are simply the residue of a complex system and interaction of many parts, and may have little to no functional consequence.
 
Why Did This Happen?
The authors’ conclusion is consistent with many trauma researchers who believe societal impacts and life experiences determine most of one’s lack of success in life. Rather than being the Holy Grail that will finally find scientific proof for a belief system, epigenetics appears destined to go the way of brain imaging. While most researchers still fervently claim that trauma damages brains, pre-trauma prospective studies show that brain differences pre-exist trauma exposure [4]. Epigenetic differences are likely to pre-exist life experiences, too [5], and any shifts during psychotherapy may be noise.
 
​
REFERENCES
[1] Sullivan, A. D. W., Merrill, S. M., Konwar, C., Coccia, M., Rivera, L., MacIsaac, J. L., Lieberman, A. F., Kobor, M. S., & Bush, N. R. (2024). Intervening After Trauma: Child–Parent Psychotherapy Treatment Is Associated With Lower Pediatric Epigenetic Age Acceleration. Psychological Science, 35(9), 1062-1073. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241260247
[2] Horvath S. (2013). DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types. Genome Biology 14(10):R115. doi: 10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115.
[3] Katrinli, S., King, A.P., Duval, E.R. et al.(2023).  DNA methylation GrimAge acceleration in US military veterans with PTSD. Neuropsychopharmacol. 48, 773–780. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01537-z
[4] Julia A. DiGangi et al. (2013). Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review 33:728-744.
Andrea Danese et al. (2017). The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians. American Journal of Psychiatry 174 (2017): 349-361.
Michael S. Scheeringa (2020). Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research (2020).
[5] Zannas AS, Linnstaedt SD, An X, et al. (2023). Epigenetic aging and PTSD outcomes in the immediate
aftermath of trauma. Psychological Medicine 53(15):7170-7179. doi:10.1017/S0033291723000636
 
 
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written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
Judith Herman says the quiet part out loud in her latest book. One intention of my Trauma Dispatch posts is to demonstrate the pervasiveness of progressive ideology in trauma research, how the purpose of most trauma research has not been to discover slivers of truth in the slow, incremental march of science; the purpose has been to promote a dogma, either to weaponize intellectual ideas for social justice reforms, or, simply for ideology’s sake to make the outer world appear seamless with researchers’ internal worlds. Those who approach trauma as a true science—unbiased, skeptical, empirical—are a small fraction of academia.
 
If any doubt lingers that ideology is the underlying driver of the intellectual leaders of postmodern trauma research, Herman dispelled that in the opening sentences:
“When I first wrote the forgotten history of trauma, in Trauma and Recovery, I argued that the suffering of traumatized people is a matter not only of individual psychology but also, always, of social justice. Because the violence at the source of trauma aims at domination and oppression [emphasis mine], even to recognize trauma, to name it, requires the historical context of broad social movements for human rights...”

In 1992, Herman published a paper that would make her a revered figure in the trauma world; she proposed a new disorder, called complex PTSD, which redefined borderline personality disorder as a trauma disorder caused solely by oppressive life experiences [3]. Primarily a community clinician, rigorous research was not one of her skills. Her research methods could be generously described as flawed—always samples of convenience, cross-sectional, mostly small, and predominantly non-standardized qualitative data.

Book Summary
Part One explained that sexual assault trauma is derived from tyranny, inequality, and patriarchy.
Part Two began describing principles of restorative justice--peace circles for apologies instead of incarceration. Chapters stressed the value of acknowledgment of crimes by perpetrators and methods of holding them accountable. Part Three described restorative justice’s healing potential of restitution from and rehabilitation for perpetrators.
​
The totality of her evidence for Parts Two and Three came from her interviews of 30 informants, 26 women and 4 men, spread over twenty years. The interviews were unstructured; most interviews were recorded (she neglects to give a number).
Herman’s prescription to salve the world is a dismantling of perceived oppression to provide the only worthwhile version of justice, which includes repair of relationships.
 
Analysis
Herman’s prescription is, by her own admission, only a vision. She wrote, “At present, the RJ movement is still too new to have amassed a convincing track record on preventing recidivism for violent crimes.”
​
The book omits the history of massive improvements in acknowledging trauma in society, laws to punish it, and efforts to prevent it. In Herman’s telling, you might think human civilization had never addressed sexual assault.
​
The book lacks a serious literature review. Not a single research study was described in any detail. Her evidence, being from a tiny sample and an unsound methodology, is not publishable in a moderately good, peer-reviewed journal.
​
The overall lightness of the book suggests it was a patchwork attempt to publish a treasured idea at the end of her career. Herman, now 82 years old, admitted she started this project twenty years ago, but was interrupted by personal illness and a move to assisted living.

Herman's ideology that she has been pushing for forty years is that human nature is highly malleable and oppression—labelled erroneously as trauma—is the evil that causes all problems. Her prescription for justice, based on this faulty view of human nature, will fail like her recommendations about borderline personality and complex PTSD, and will not truly help any victims, but it does create a simulated reality to appear seamless with her beliefs.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman (1977). Father-daughter incest. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2(4):735-756
[2] Judith Lewis Herman (1986). Histories of violence in an outpatient population: An exploratory study. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 56(1):137-141
Judith Lewis Herman, J. Christopher Perry, Bessel van der Kolk (1989). Childhood trauma in borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 146(4):490-495
[3] Judith Lewis Herman (1992). Complex PTSD: A syndrome in survivors of prolonged and repeated trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress 5(3):377-391
 
 
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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
 
 
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Source: KUNC NPR news
Read time: 1.8 minutes
 
This Happened
On July 27, 2024, a shelter for homeless youth in Denver held a grand opening of their new facility built with trauma-informed design.
 
Who Did This?
Urban Peak is a non-profit organization that provides temporary shelter, permanent housing, case management, street outreach, education, and medical services. The CEO, Christina Carlson, holds a masters degree in social work.
Shop Works Architecture, based in Denver, created the new shelter. The firm specializes in trauma-informed design. They are a believer in the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) narrative; their website links to former California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris’ TED Talk on ACES.
 
The Premise
The principle of trauma-informed design is that physical space can be so stressful as to cause mental problems in individuals who have previously been traumatized. Physical environments should promote calm, safety, dignity, and empowerment to protect and heal clients who are trauma victims and staff who suffer vicarious trauma on the job. These are achieved through spatial arrangement, furniture selections, artwork, ample light, soothing color, and greenery.

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

Analysis
There are neither negative nor positive studies of trauma-informed architecture impact on well-being. Belief in the power of trauma-informed design, nevertheless, is a staple of the progressive vision for how to lift individuals out of poverty and achieve equity of outcomes with government and community assistance. While design elements can promote temporary spiritual inspiration, this vision promotes false hope because it is unlikely to address root causes of human behavioral problems.
Interior design change may seem like a harmless piece of activism, but the problem with calling a class of architecture trauma-informed design is that it lets go unchallenged another attempt to control language and ideas promoting the ideology that human nature is highly malleable, and genetic-based differences play no part in human behaviors. It serves as a constant symbolism of the misguided progressive intellectual framework that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and we simply need to counter oppression with new life experiences to change human nature. Those policies, having no basis in research, will not provide long-term help.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Non-profit organizations often act as quasi-governmental extensions to accomplish tasks that governments can’t do as easily. Government funds can be funneled to non-profits under humanitarian objectives with little debate or citizen input. It’s part of the administrative state to rule by science, and the state decides what the science is even when it is nonexistent.
 
 
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Source: International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies
Read time: 2.5 minutes

This Happened
The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) released the program schedule for its 2024 annual conference.
 
Who Did This
ISTSS is the world’s largest professional organization for researchers and clinicians interested in psychological trauma and stress. Over 1,000 attend its annual conference, which is where all the leading trauma researchers present their latest works.
 
The Premise
Being the premium gathering of trauma researchers, this conference influences the direction of research and clinical practice, and educates the next generation of professionals. It is the indispensable venue for networking and getting your work recognized.
 
Analysis
Over three days in November 2024, approximately 527 talks are scheduled. Of those, 170 (32%) will promote ideology of progressive leftist ideas. The breakdown of those 170 talks, is that 126 will be on oppression-based stress. Racial discrimination is the most common (44), followed by LGBTQ+/transgender discrimination (21), followed by immigrant discrimination, historical/intergenerational trauma, moral injury, and man-made climate change. These oppression experiences are controversial concepts for which no good evidence exists that they cause psychological disorders.
There will also be 28 talks on toxic stress and 16 on complex PTSD.
 
Lest one thinks these concepts will be presented in a neutral fashion that will stimulate productive debate of opposing views, that will not happen. I attended my first ISTSS conference in 2000 and presented my work for the next fifteen years. It was the conference I most looked forward to every year because PTSD research was a fresh field. Groundbreaking studies on important topics were being conducted. Gradually, the conference became overrun with controversial topics by activist researchers. I tried to generate debate from the audience, but this never went far. The presenters and audience members seemed to have no intellectual framework at the ready to understand how they might be mistaken. And, there were no other skeptics in the rooms to extend the discussions. I stopped going after 2017.
 
What should talks focus on? The types of questions that would provide real help to victims of trauma include improving access to treatment (13 talks), accurate assessment (0), prediction of responders and nonresponders (0), better retention in treatment (12), implementing evidence-based treatments (25), innovations in therapy techniques (18), and mastery of therapy techniques (0). These will account for only thirteen percent of the program.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Institutions of higher learning suffer from ideological capture in which professors in academia are overwhelmingly liberal. In psychology, the ratio of Democrat to Republican faculty members is 16.8:1. In sociology, it’s 43.8:1, and in anthropology it’s 56:0 [1].
 
David Horowitz documented the impact of this imbalance in his books The Professors (2006) and Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom (2007). He described activism within campuses as attempts to deconstruct the nation’s identity and divide its communities into victims and oppressors, all under the banner of social justice.
 
Chris Rufo diagnosed the genesis of this imbalance as the “long march through the institutions,” which he claims is the skeleton key for understanding the modern Left: it’s how they captured power, how they shape the narrative, and how they influence what you think about the world around you. It explains the invention of buzzwords and control of language that you hear but aren’t quite sure what they mean or where they came from.
 
Rufo marks the 1960s as the shift of Marxist intellectual strategy from popular revolt to the long march [2]. But the groundwork was set in the early 1900s when many of the social sciences—namely, psychology, sociology, and anthropology—were born. The vagueness of these sciences make them ideal for bending scientific methods to support ideology. Those who gravitated to these fields were often self-selected individuals with fevered dreams of social justice [3].
 
The Heterodox Academy was formed in 2015 by three scholars to try to combat this lack of ideological diversity through blog posts and hosting discussions on campuses. They are trying to ensure that universities are truth-seeking and provide constructive disagreement. While large in size, the effort has been deemed a failure, however, because the discussions are often liberal professors debating with liberal professors [4]. Apparently, there aren’t many conservative professors to go around.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Mitchell Langbert (2018). Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty. Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:186–197. DOI 10.1007/s12129-018-9700-x
[2] Christopher F. Rufo (2021). Critical race theory: What it is and how to fight it. Imprimis. A Publication of Hillsdale College 50(3), March 2021:1-5
[3] Carl N. Degler (1991). In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press
[4] Nathan Cofnas (2022). Four reasons why Heterodox Academy failed. Acad. Quest. 35(4):13-24, DOI: 10.51845.35.4.4
 
 
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