Should the main organization of psychological trauma experts have the public’s trust?

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies logo

Written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: ~2.5 minutes
 
To solve complex social problems, at least two things are needed: (1) Policy makers need information outside their areas of expertise in digestible formats, and (2) that information often must come from scientists. Scientists’ reason to exist in society is, in distilled form, to extract truth from the natural world for the rest of us. For psychological trauma, the main organization of scientists is the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). The worldview of those who contribute to ISTSS recommendations, however, does not always represent what the evidence says about trauma.
 
Since its founding in 1985 as the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (“International” was added in 1990), the Society has done more than any other organization, by far, for the promotion of good science and competent clinical work to assess and treat trauma victims. They have published the main journal for trauma research, the Journal of Traumatic Stress, since 1988, and hold an annual conference every November.
I joined in 1994 and presented my work at nearly every annual conference for twenty-three years. I, like almost all trauma researchers, considered it my professional home. I was “sort-of famous” within the group as one member told me when seeing my name tag at a conference.
I attended my last ISTSS conference, however, in 2017. I had been dreading the conferences for several years because, in part, the presentations were increasingly uninformative lectures about events that were not traumas or theories that weren’t true. I had tried to keep it interesting for myself by going to the audience microphone in the question-and-answer periods, but if I dared question their dogmas, presenters stared back blankly as if I had just suggested killing their pets. Viewpoint diversity? No thanks.
 
Due to the nature of trauma, ISTSS had always been forced to struggle with slapdash research and dubious ideas. What’s new has been the rise of advocacy. The rise was gradual, and perhaps inevitable, as the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became increasingly well-known through the 1990s and 2000s. By 2005, advocacy was on steroids.
Activist-minded researchers expanded the notion of trauma well beyond life-threatening experiences to include everyday stress experiences (e.g., neglect, emotional abuse, divorce, poverty) in order to draw attention.
Complex PTSD was tacitly accepted as a valid disorder even though there is zero validation data and it had been savaged by multiple experts [1-3].
The concept of toxic stress—that psychological trauma permanently damages the brain—was embraced as canon by invited keynote speakers and Society reports even though the only supporting human data comes from weak cross-sectional studies. Pre-trauma prospective studies fail to support it.
Climate change was endorsed as a source of trauma in an ISTSS brief even though the level of threat and the man-made theory have been debunked by many credible scientists, and, even if it were true, is more of an everyday stress than a life-threatening trauma.
The list goes on to racial trauma, historical trauma, intergenerational transmission of trauma and other unproven theories. In the 2023 conference program, nearly a third of the symposia were ideologically-based on complex PTSD, toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, equity, race, COVID, or other non-trauma experiences.
 
Why Did This Happen?
These theories were invoked for the humanitarian project to conquer suffering at the expense of other virtues that parallels the progressive leftist agenda of the past century. ISTSS got a late start, but its evolution has tracked closely to the progressive ideological capture of academia in general, including the acceleration of more radical woke movements in the past decade. The mission of ISTSS has been impacted by trauma activists to become a diluted archive of uncritical psychology, politics, sociology, and anthropology based on emotional appeals to perfect society, presented as science.
The cost of this advocacy is high. One cannot endlessly redefine concepts to suit activist needs irrespective of data without eventually sacrificing truth, honesty, and holding the respect of others. While ISTSS still holds a seat at the table for publishing and presenting good studies, as long as they don’t contradict the canon too directly, policy makers should not mistake it for behaving with a purity of mission to find truth.

REFERENCES
[1] Shawn P. Cahill et al., "Sequential Treatment for Child Abuse-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Methodological Comment on Cloitre, Koenen, Cohen, and Han (2002)," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 72 (2004): 543-548.
[2] Dean G. Kilpatrick. "A special section on complex trauma and a few thoughts about the need for more rigorous research on treatment efficacy, effectiveness, and safety," Journal of Traumatic Stress 18 (2005): 379-384, p. 383.
[3] Patricia A. Resick et al. "A Critical Evaluation of the Complex PTSD Literature: Implications for DSM-5," Journal of Traumatic Stress 25 (2012): 241-251

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