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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CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS  Jack Shonkoff, M.D., founder of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Source: The Trouble With Trauma Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened For the past two decades, a Harvard pediatrician and his university-funded center spearheaded the invention and dissemination of the term “toxic stress” and helped create an international phenomenon that has persuaded much of the world that there is a public health crisis. Who Did This? Jack Shonkoff is a highly-respected pediatrician, who, over a nearly forty-year career, has over 150 publications, and has been honored with many awards and influential positions. In 2006, he founded the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University with the intention of using scientific knowledge to address the problems of children dealing with adversity. The Premise Shortly before founding the Center, Shonkoff created the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. This council of experts crafted a framework around the concept of “toxic stress” on how to improve outcomes for children. The framework was distilled into a policy-guided-by-science playbook with four steps: 1) Emphasize that we’ve hit a wall. A massive list of poor outcomes— poverty, poor academic performance, crime, drug abuse, murder, domestic violence, and multigenerational racism— just will not go away with current efforts. 2) Claim that it’s nearly all due to stress and trauma. Children experience high rates of trauma, violence, poverty, neglect, racism, and rampant disparities. By assertion, any rational person can see that stress and trauma must be the causes of poor outcomes and represent the roots of social class disparities in health. 3) Super-charge the claim as permanent biological damage. To make matters more urgent, assert that these experiences of stress and trauma cause permanent damage to brains and bodies. 4) Billions must be invested in trauma-informed approaches. This situation constitutes a public health crisis, perhaps the greatest of all, and the commensurate response must be massive prevention and intervention programs in the realm of public health.
Analysis The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, despite what one might infer from its name, is not a council representing the nation; it is a private group of eleven-members, four of whom are from Harvard. They were likely hand-picked for their shared vision that concurs with the toxic stress narrative. Toxic stress is not a scientific term. The Council’s own literature is surprisingly candid in acknowledging that they invented the term toxic stress. The members of the Council agreed to create and disseminate the phrase toxic stress to convey their message to the public because, by their own admission, “just saying ‘stress’ more loudly wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go”[1] To fashion credibility for the concept of toxic stress, they invented two other types of stress: positive stress and tolerable stress. These types were not based on validation from science. The Council’s unswerving assertion that stress and trauma cause poor outcomes and permanent brain damage is, in fact, controversial and has not held up under pre-trauma prospective studies in humans [2-4]. The Council has been shy about acknowledging that one hundred percent of the adverse child experiences studies they cite to support their assertions have been cross-sectional surveys, which have zero power to prove causative theories. Prior to 2009, the phrase toxic stress had never been used, except by the pediatrician Shonkoff, in a peer-reviewed science journal to describe a cause of human psychological problems. Despite the shaky evidence base for the concept of toxic stress, it has proven highly attractive, and implementations of the playbook have become commonplace in a relatively short span of about ten years. Why Is This Happening? The idea that humans are highly malleable, such that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences, and that individual differences in success or failure are due almost wholly to outside forces as opposed to unchanging personal traits caused by genetics, is consistent with the progressive liberal agenda of the past hundred years. As described in The Trouble With Trauma [5], one speculation to explain the driving motives of progressives can be based on moral foundations theory: This type of activism is driven by individuals with skewed moral foundations that disproportionately favor care for the disadvantaged even when it defies the evidence and may constrain other moral concerns such as individual freedom, tradition, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty. Should This Be Attempted? The toxic stress/ACEs playbook is based on a fatal conceit of believing that we possess the knowledge of what causes disparate social and behavioral outcomes for children, and that much, and perhaps all, of that cause is trauma and adversity. Attempting to guide policies with knowledge that we do not in fact possess, is likely to cause much waste and harm. REFERENCES [1] Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. "A Decade of Science Informing Policy: The Story of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child," (2014). [2] Julia A. DiGangi et al. “Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature.” Clinical Psychology Review 33 (2013):728-744. [3] Andrea Danese et al. "The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians," American Journal of Psychiatry 174 (2017): 349-361. [4] Michael S. Scheeringa. "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] Michael S. Scheeringa (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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