A new article published in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health finds that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are common in Kenya, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
The research, led by Yohannes Dibaba Wado from the African Population and Health Research Center, additionally finds that ACEs are associated with adolescents’ mental health issues in all three countries. This was especially true for adolescents who reported four or more ACEs.
The authors write:
“Overall, the findings of the current study demonstrate that ACEs are common among adolescents in Kenya, Indonesia, and Vietnam, albeit with significant differences in prevalence between all three countries. Further, these findings show that despite differences in prevalence, ACEs are associated with increased odds of mental disorders in all three countries. As such, prevention or minimization of the number of ACEs experienced by an individual may be an effective approach for reducing the risk of mental disorders in adolescence.”
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“Childhood trauma is a global mental health crisis, researchers warn” – so much irony in this statement. First of all we are calling childhood trauma itself a mental health crisis. It isn’t obviously – trauma is the mark of an injury, so to imply their mind has an illness is absurd, unless an animal is mentally ill when it’s been traumatised through abuse. Secondly you call childhood trauma a global mental health phenomena, which if it is then it is a ubiquitous fact of life in modern global existence rather then some kind of pathology as implied by the notion of mental illness so why do you and they keep pathologizing a rising tide of global and social childhood suffering? My goodness, this and the last research article on childhood medicating being chosen over therapy are such a slide from the salient and important long-term outcome studies and cross-cultural studies that Robert Whitaker drew on and listed in his book called Mad In America. Now you’re retreating right back into your trenches because of all the hostile fire and are throwing out nothing burgers instead. You are merely psychiatric commentary in these two articles – you could be writing some student psychiatry magazine at some psychiatric department and University for trainee psychiatrists to read. Can’t wait till the next research article. I’m write my response in advance. “Bucket! Quick! I’m gonna be sick! Oh too late, stop: grab a mop.”
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Maybe in four years we’ll get an article like “Researchers Discover Calling Suffering People ‘Mentally Ill’ Worsens Mental Health Symptoms”.
And then the article will be a still-practicing psychologist going “us clinicians should take this into consideration when dealing with the mentally ill, that part of their illness is clearly an allergic reaction to the stigma around mental health, which we should fight by doubling down even harder on the biomedical model.”
Cruelty and capitalism and child abuse are certainly the only real epidemics here. Glad to see others get really bothered by the framing of “mental illness” when the only thing wrong with a person is the environment, and the “illness” is literally just the manifestation of defense mechanisms. Like at that point, it just means you have a working soul, which is like the opposite of illness.
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I think perhaps since civilization began children have been seen as chattel and tools. The American school system is based on the old agrarian need for labor during the summer and harvest periods.
Many global communities have been haunted literally and figuratively by colonism and violence. So rubber plantations, rice plantations, mineral mining of all kinds, human trafficking, and outsourcing of money.
Joseph Conrad writing in his second language did not describe the children in his novella Heart of Darkness. Most literary did not though Elizabeth Barrett Browning did write one poem of protest when living in Italy. Toni Morrison did in her novel Beloved.Louise Erditch as written as well. But it the concept of honoring children small rises and then always the deep falls. The names of folks who did try to research, learn , help lost in the archives.
And even in elite families daughters were used as pawns for power and control and third sons sent off to religious institutions for again power and control purposes.
Abuse and neglect rampant. And then the children are blamed or grow up as we are seeing now so full of moral injury they become moral injury themselves.
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