Childhood Adversity/Trauma

When I lived in Massachusetts I taught yoga and led writing groups for alternative mental health communities. While the organizations I worked for were alternative, many of the students and participants were heavily drugged with psychiatric pharmaceuticals. There was one skinny teenager I'd never have forgotten who listed the drugs he was on for me once in the yoga room after class: a long list of stimulants, neuroleptics, moods stabilizers; far too many drugs and classes of drugs to remember. I was at the housewarming party of an old friend, and who should walk in but that boy who used to come to my yoga classes and writing groups religiously. And he was no longer a boy; he was now a young man. “I'm thinking yoga teacher,” he said. I nodded. Did he remember where? “I'm not stupid,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I'm not on drugs anymore. I'm not stupid anymore.”

Researchers from the University of Toronto departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, publishing in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, propose that various forms of stress,...

It has been twenty years since my last suicide attempt. I was barely eighteen years old, and had already spent the last four years, my entire adolescence, really, in and out of the mental health system. On that day, twenty years ago, I left the hospital with nothing but a prescription for yet another drug in my hand, sent back to the decrepit group home where I began my adult life.

When I teach workshops or lead discussions on coming off psychiatric drugs and alternatives, there are invariably parents present who are at loose ends. They want to know what to do for their children, how to help them best, and how it can be possible for their child to live without medication given all they have been through.

MIA blogger and mental health advocate Leah Harris discusses growing up with parents diagnosed with schizophrenia, her personal experience with the psychiatric system, and psychiatric drugs.

When we share our stories publicly, whether in speaking, writing, or another art form, we acknowledge we are part of something bigger. We are aware we aren't the only ones who have been abused or witnessed abuse, or who are scared to let go of our ancestral shame and fear. We are, rather, part of an entire generation, an entire society that is moving away from silence, blame and abuse. In sharing our stories, we instantly recover from a big hunk of loneliness, loneliness that might not be so easily resolved sitting in a room across from a professional, with a few non-offensive art pieces on the walls. We acknowledge that every single one of us who experiences physical or emotional symptoms is holding onto things for others, in our bodies, and together, word by word, we can break free.

“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.” “Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

Psychology Today offers a psychoanalytic perspective on childhood bipolar disorder that finds trauma at the root, a view that sees Beyond Meds as extending beyond the diagnoses...

Gianna Kali reviews the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, "one of the largest investigations ever conducted to assess associations between childhood maltreatment and later-life...

This morning Kayla Harrison won the first ever Olympic gold medal in the history of USA Judo. Kayla has overcome many, many obstacles on...

This study, in Child: Care, Health and Development, adds to the research that "high levels of expressed emotion (EE) in parents have been found...

Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales find that fear in infants is a predictor of guilt in later life, and write in Development and...

Canadian researchers, publishing today in the journal Pediatrics, find that physical punishment such as spanking is associated with an increased risk of mental disorders....

Researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands, publishing online June 20 in Neuroscience, found that prenatal fluoxetine (Prozac) differentially affected the development of glucocorticoid receptors...

A study of 566 families with 1416 bipolar-disordered members, and 675 families with 1726 depressed members by researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University...

A touching article in the Las Vegas Sun follows one child from abandonment through foster placements, polypharmacy, suicidality, delinquency and homelessness to stability off...

Maternal antenatal depression is highly correlated with a history of the mother having been mistreated in childhood, and these two facts significantly increase the...

Researchers from the universities of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Orleans collected MRI scans and assessments of executive functioning and stress exposure from 61...

Data drawn from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project show that children raised in institutions in Romania exhibit elevated symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, depression, and...

Researchers in Spain assessed 71 patients diagnosed with psychoses for dissociative experiences, trauma, delusions and hallucinations. Childhood trauma was positively associated with dissociation (r =...

According to data drawn from 608 patients of an early intervention program in Dublin, presented at the 3rd Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS)...

Researchers from Australia and the UK found that people with a schizophrenia diagnosis almost four times more likely than controls to have a history of...

In the first analysis of 30 years of studies, including 46 studies (selected from 27,000) involving 80,000 subjects, researchers in the U.K. and Australia...