Will one of the most conservative states in the country pass a neo-Marxist trauma-informed care law?

CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Rep. Vanessa Summers (D)

Source: Indiana House Democratic Caucus press release and The Statehouse File.com
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In January 2025, two bills were introduced in the current session of the Indiana state legislature attempting to mandate trauma-informed practices state-wide.
 
Who Is Doing This?
Vanessa Summers, author of House bill 1241, is the Democrat representative of District 99, a northwest section of Indianapolis. She also authored a failed resolution shortly after Trump’s inauguration stating that the General Assembly affirms its commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She claimed “Whereas, The American Dream belongs to all of us, not just 13 billionaires and multi-millionaires.”
 
Michael Crider and Ed Charbonneau, authors of Senate bill 181, are Republican senators of Greenfield and Valparaiso respectively.
 
The Premise
House Bill 1241 proposed to create a trauma-informed care commission that would meet to “identify, evaluate, and make recommendations regarding best practices and research models with respect to children, youth, and families who have experienced trauma." The bill emphasized focusing on how to implement practices in educational settings.
On February 20, the bill passed the House of Representatives 71-15 and headed to the Senate for consideration.
 
Senate Bill 181 proposed to require trauma-informed care training as part of the curriculum for nursing education programs. On March 11, it failed to pass out of committee primarily because the head of the state nurse’s association refused to support a bill that would be the first to target a specific piece of psychology within nursing. 
 
Analysis
The failure of Senate Bill 181 is heartening and was expected in a conservative state like Indiana. The head of the nursing association noted that there are dozens of psychological issues that could be added to nursing training and there is no good justification for making a special case for the so-called “trauma-informed” agenda.
 
The objective of the other bill—House Bill 1241—for creating a commission is nearly always the first step in the strategy to embed an intellectual framework into the over-expanded bureaucratic state. After a year of “study” on a pre-ordained conclusion, new programs would be recommended, launched on small budgets, and then become cemented in the deep state as rights for a special interest group that never had positive rights before. This raises several additional concerns.

​First, the title of House Bill 1241—"Trauma Informed Care”—is a misnomer. The bill was not aimed at addressing trauma.

​The psychiatric definition of trauma that is used in the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder and is justified as the only type of life events that lead to development of a psychiatric disorder is that the index event must be life-threatening [1].

​These types of events are always sudden, unexpected, and create a moment of terror for one’s life. The language of the bill, however, made it clear that it was aimed at adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), most of which are ordinary daily stressors and are not life-threatening.
Conflating stress with trauma is deliberate obfuscation by ACE activists to deceive people to think life stress is exceedingly harmful as part of the Leftist progressive worldview that humans are incredibly fragile.

Second, the directive for the proposed commission included to summarize the evidence on how to prevent trauma. This is an unrealistic utopian dream. There are no known proven strategies on how to prevent stress or trauma beyond the many existing laws and the safety that comes with living in stable two-parent families.

Third, the bill demanded creation of a state-wide screening program for stress experiences similar to the failed California ACEs Aware campaign. This type of screening effort has been repeatedly criticized as misguided and harmful (see here and here).

Fourth, the bill directed the commission to focus on educational settings. This represents the playbook—which many parents across America have revolted against—of psychological programs being targeted at the nation’s children, such as critical race theory, DEI, transgender, and social sensitivity programming.
 
Why Is This Happening?
This represents another of the many attempts at the city and state levels by neo-Marxist activists to capture our public institutions from within. Rather than marching in the streets like the 1960s, they have been successful at driving cultural change through bureaucratic reforms.
The fact that Republicans are sometimes associated with efforts shows how they have been duped by the Leftist’s strategy which is careful to code their message in academic-speak: Marx’s theory of universal oppression is replaced with “adverse childhood experiences,” and total transformation of culture is replaced with “trauma-informed care.” Their true object is not the pursuit of evidence-based interventions to help children flourish, but the pursuit of cultural revolution.
 
References
[1] Kilpatrick DG, Resnick HS, Acierno R (2009).  Should PTSD Criterion A be retained? Journal of Traumatic Stress.  22(5):374-83, 2009 Oct.