Why does a national trauma center provide training on the nonexistent developmental trauma disorder?

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

NCTSN resource of 42 webinars

Source: National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
On 7/25/24, an email from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) announced the availability of an updated resource to educate clinicians on developmental trauma disorder (DTD).
 
Who Did This?
The NCTSN was founded in 2000, and is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The purpose was to raise the standard of care for children who experience trauma. A local site becomes part of the network by proposing to develop a specialized focus. There are currently 199 sites and 200 formerly-funded sites.
The resource on DTD was the work product of the University of Connecticut site, led by psychologist Julian Ford, Ph.D.
 
The Premise
The aim was to educate clinicians how to treat patients on the supposition they have DTD. The resource consists of 42 recorded webinars. Nearly all of them were dramatizations of treatment situations with actors, followed by discussions led by Julian Ford with other experts, and Q&A from the audience.
The situations were designed to emphasize emotion dysregulation, attachment, transgender identity, intergenerational trauma, racial stress, oppressed immigrants, dissociation, and family connection as a source of resilience.
 
Analysis
Developmental trauma disorder is not a recognized disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). It was rejected by the DSM-5 committee in 2012 because it lacked evidence of validity. Since then, no new evidence of validity has appeared. The advocates for DTD, however, passionately want this diagnosis to exist, and have simply ignored the lack of evidence. Their strategy over the past twenty years has been to assert that it exists and hope that force of repetition enthrones it into research and clinical cultures. In my book, The Trouble With Trauma, a chapter explains the history of how this disorder was fabricated, and the extraordinary lengths researchers have gone to invent flawed studies to support it [1].
 
One of the 42 modules was deceptively titled A Spirited Conversation About PTSD and Developmental Trauma Disorder: The Pros and Cons. The three discussants (John Briere, Julian Ford, and Michael Suvak) acknowledged that they all believed in the concept of DTD, and the only spirited thing about the conversation was their different opinions on how to implement it.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The NCTSN was founded on the promise that it would bring some evidence-based order to the wild west of therapy practices in the United States to help children who suffered trauma. While the network does a few good things to promote evidence-based treatments that are backed by science, it has achieved no major successes in making these treatments more commonly used by clinicians.
Instead, the NCTSN has become a national failure as a source of unreliable and extraordinary claims. The network heavily promotes ideologically-driven beliefs that are not supported by science, including white supremacy, toxic stress, complex trauma, trauma-informed practices in schools, intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, and misidentifies chronic stressors—racial discrimination, colonialism, and unconventional gender identities—as traumatic experiences when they do not meet the tradtional life-threat definition of trauma.
This is a concern because, by its national profile and sheer size, the NCTSN has become the main source of child trauma information and training.
 
I’ve explained the underlying cognitive motivation for this hub of activism as based on the moral foundation of progressive liberals who care for the disadvantaged to the detriment of other moral concerns (such as tradition, fairness, loyalty, patriotism, and liberty) [1]. Fighting for alleged victims of oppression best serves their need for moral status. This requires believing that human nature is almost completely molded by life experiences, such that individual differences in success or failure are caused by experiences, not unchanging personal traits caused by genetics. The progressive sensibility yearns for a predictability that the movement of life and society can be controlled, to be able to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” That is a false certainty that leads nowhere good.
To use psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model, his analogy for how we form beliefs is a dog in which the body represents quick, moral judgements and the tail represents reason [2]. The tail does not wag the dog. NCTSN has become a body of outlandish assertions about trauma that are based on skewed moral judgements, and the tail of reason has no influence.

 
REFERENCES
[1] Scheeringa MS (2022). The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. ISBN 978-1949481563
[2] Haidt J (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment, Psychological Review 108: 814-834.
 

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