A new article published in BMC Psychiatry finds that childhood maltreatment and trauma (CMT) is linked to increased psychosis symptom severity in people diagnosed with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD).
The research, led by Nina Mørkved of the Arctic University of Norway, concludes that this link is not explained or moderated by parental mental health problems. This finding suggests that childhood maltreatment independently contributes to psychosis symptom severity.
Previous research has repeatedly found a link between adverse childhood experiences and mental health problems. However, critics have suggested that poor parental mental health may be the actual cause of the observed links in that research. These critics maintain that poor parental mental health acts as both a genetic and environmental factor contributing to mental health problems, thereby preserving the biomedical emphasis on genetics in the face of overwhelming evidence implicating maltreatment and abuse.
The current finding undercuts that criticism by establishing a link between childhood maltreatment and psychosis severity independent of poor parental mental health.
The authors write:
“The present study examined the moderating effect of parental MHP on the relationship between CMT and psychosis in SSDs,” the authors write. “We found an association between CMT and psychosis symptom severity in SSDs, especially for the PANSS total scores and the PANSS negative sub scale scores. Parental MHP was not found to moderate the association of CMT and psychosis symptom severity in our sample of SSDs, suggesting that the effect of CMT on psychosis symptom severity is independent of having parental MHP.”
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I would like to see this studies methods because I think it is clear that trauma does obviously run in families and so too the psychological and emotional consequences, and this can be plainly seen in everyday life. I have also observed extensively in my life the relationships between our problems and those of the parents, and it is known for example that addiction or trouble with the police often effects parents and then children, and it seems to me entirely false to divide such problems as mental health, addiction, and normality, because the effects of our social conditioning is the most compelling general candidate for a mental pathology in our society and it effects everyone, and all subsequent emotional and psychological traumas emerge in such a conditioned mind which therefore shapes their expression and constrains their resolution through understanding. But I am sure that if we survey the actual living terrain, and have good study methodologies we will see that there are obvious patterns of psychological and emotional unresolved trauma and associated dysfunction, and perhaps they are approaching it too crudely and with too narrow categories and definitions of mental health to capture these complex associations. I’m going to have to look at the study…
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The study doesn’t make it entirely clear how the identification of parental mental health is achieved through an interview with the patient, and it seems they may be asking if the parents have a diagnosis of a mental illness or of psychosis – this isn’t seeing things as they are, seeing what other problems they may have, for example addiction, gambling, violence, sexual promiscuity and the like which can’t be separated from the forms of dysfunction that leads to a mental health diagnosis. These are not separate problem, and it is obvious, undeniable, that trauma frequently runs through families and therefore there is a contradiction between that obvious fact, the studies association between trauma and psychosis, and the finding that there is no association between child and parent mental health. I think this seems like a flawed study to me and surely there have been countless studies to show association between parent and child mental health difficulties. And their phrasing was ambiguous: they said there was an association between trauma and psychosis severity that was not mediated by parental mental health. Obviously a psychosis diagnosis in a parent can never mediate a child’s psychosis but obviously the whole familial, social and psychological environment is that which shapes the development of the child’s consciousness and life processes. So what they are insinuating was that there is not any causal relationship between adult mental health and child severity of psychosis, but how could there be when adult mental health is just a conceptual framing isolating an arbitrary set of human problems separated from other human problems? It seems they might be trying to prove the case against biological heredity and are missing the complex associations between the problems we all deal with as adults – psychological, emotional, behavioural etc – and those of our parents. No empirical research study like this is capable of apprehending the full living terrain – only we in our lives can do that and can discover these manifold and complex associations. And it is fully comprehensible if we learn how to observe and understand our own minds – and then this understanding deepens our understanding of all others. Again, no academic approach can do this – only a meditative or enquiring mind, one concerned to see things and understand things as they are.
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I know I criticize MIA but it’s a much better standard in terms of truth then almost any media content that I know of. None of the mainstream or online news media has any real potency or penetration of the urgent problems of today because they are not so committed to evidence and truth then those who are concerned about a serious issue like MIA, while all content on YouTube is degenerating into such an appalling and toxic standard all catering to the most immature and destructive parts of us which demand with all such media the ingredient of stimulation, which means they demand sensationalism. And because content creators want to attract attention this is what they offer, but when you examine the content it is a nothing burger generally conflating wild theories and facts. This is creating utter chaos and disorder in our minds and in the world, and is the field within which conspiracy theories and insane political ideologies and movements thrive. And how can we isolate this problem from those social presentations we denote as ‘mentally ill’?
Amongst all this what is missing is free and intelligent human beings not concerned with their employer or their industry or their business or their viewers but with the penetration and understanding of all the grave problems of humanity from a global point of view, with a pure truth-seeking intent, and I have only ever seen such discussions take place really in the 60s and 70s, even on mainstream media. Even many Western political interviews were dominated by the truth-seeking spirit, and politicians wouldn’t dream of saying things that could easily be proven non-factual – even Nixon never said obvious non-truths, let alone those that he didn’t even expect the interviewer or any other intelligent person to believe. How can we disconnect this things from the massively increasing problem that we refer to as mental illness? Clearly all of these are social illnesses, and have a common underlying bedrock – nature dominated by social history. We can only understand all these things as one – we can’t understand them when we isolate them, hence can’t understand anything in our world.
There has been an invisible and insidious disempowerment of the socially conditioned mind since the 70s and a deepening of all our psychological and emotional problems caused by this conditioning by an increasingly insane and irrational social order. The primary problem is our social conditioning, which is the field of all of our illusions and prejudices, and the consequent destructive ignorance and unhappiness and confusion that result, but there is no solution emerging in the social terrain whatsoever. It is obvious that the only solution is not social, but to see things clearly as they are, and absolutely no media organization is helping us to do that, so most of humanity are manifestly doomed, confused, frightened human beings that will only ever be a burden and a difficulty because they are so adrift from any coherent understanding of their lives and world. That is most people alive today, and the only solution is a devotion to the truth, which is not a devotion to knowledge but an understanding of this whole thing we call human life, which is a global phenomena and can only be appreciated as one total process. All specializations therefore destroy the possibility of total understanding, and any conditioning by specializations needs to be removed in order to make possible such understanding. MIA unfortunately is conducting its enquiries within a specialization except where it is seeking to grasp the problems of psychiatry and mental health in full relation to the whole of society, because how can you invest in institutional change without even knowing if the real solution is even institutional, which it seems clear to me it certainly isn’t? One could argue that it is similar to putting all your money in crypto. But at least you’ve learned allot about your reality by confronting psychiatry through these inadequate means. Can you throw off your shackles and limitations and tackle the bigger picture surrounding your truth-seeking critical and polemical efforts?
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“This content is restricted to buyers of .” Buyers of what?
“Psychosis Severity Tied to Childhood Trauma, Not Inherited Mental Illness” … the saddest part of this is that the number one cause of so called “mental illness” today is cover ups of child abuse, since none of the “mental health professionals” may bill to help child abuse survivors, according to their “invalid” DSM “bible.”
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