Childhood Adversity/Trauma

From Medical Xpress: New research findings suggest that when pregnant women who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) feel supported by those around them, their...

From Bustle: Natural disasters often inflict psychological harm on those who experience them, increasing the likelihood of PTSD in survivors. In addition to repairing physical...

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on legislation being passed in California to go after physicians who overprescribe psychiatric drugs to foster youth. The proposed legislation also targets government agencies that fail to offer nondrug alternative therapies to help foster youth recover from traumatic childhoods.

From National Post: Antipsychotic drugs are increasingly being prescribed to children as young as two for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, aggression and behavior problems. A...

Citing a 43 percent jump since 2003, researchers estimate that 5.8 million school-aged children and teens in the US now have an ADHD diagnosis, a staggering 12 percent of this population. The new NIH-funded analysis also found that the percentage of girls diagnosed with ADHD was up 55% and that the percentage of Hispanic children diagnosed shot up 83% over the same timeframe.

Researchers examine links between police victimization and psychotic symptoms in a topical new study.

Imagine if we, as a society, started recognizing trauma, pain, grief, fear, the need for connection and understanding, and oppression without defensiveness or denial. What if, hypothetically, we saw the signs in people who were "defiant," "withdrawn," "oppositional," "depressed," "manic," or otherwise as desperate pleas to have their needs met, and stopped telling them they were sick for doing so? What would a society that actually encouraged expression of emotion, compassion, and empathy look like?

“We are consistently seeing sensory, motor, and cognitive issues pop up more and more in later childhood, partly because of inadequate opportunities to move and play at an early age,” writes Angela Hanscom in The Washington Post.

School discipline that punishes minor misbehavior may increase adolescents’ misconduct and lead to racial inequalities in school discipline.

From The Atlantic: Over the past few decades, numerous studies have documented the negative impacts of childhood adversity, indicating a correlation between growing up in an unstable...

Psychologist William Copeland writes for Mental Health Recovery that “bullying can occur at any age and the effects of which remain harmful long after the behavior has been endured.” “We, as a society, are just beginning to understand and come to terms with the havoc that bullying wreaks on the emotional lives of its victims.

Any attempt to establish an alternative diagnostic system to the predominantly biologic DSM-5 classifications or to initiate a transformation of the individually oriented mental health treatment systems needs to critically explore how, not only what, we think about health and healing, about mental and emotional suffering, about traumatic experiences and injustices, and the multiple forms of pain that are part of our human existence. The broad critique of the DSM-5 by so many national and international organizations and individual colleagues will in the end not be powerful and far reaching enough without this inquiry into the foundations of our thinking and without reflection about our ways of thinking.

This result calls into question popular notions about the correlations between personality and later-life achievement and health outcomes.

In recent months, two teams of researchers in the UK and the US published complementary findings about the epigenetic origins of schizophrenia that have scientific communities who indulge in ‘genetic conspiracy theories’ abuzz. While these results are intriguing, and no doubt involve pathbreaking research methodologies, this line of thought represents a decontextualized understanding both of the symptoms that are typically associated with schizophrenia, and their causes.

In this episode of the Psychoanalytic Voices podcast, Dr. William Sharp discusses his work introducing psychoanalytic techniques into school-based settings.

The authors of a recent study acknowledge that "social functioning deficits are a core component of schizophrenia spectrum disorders." [Emphasis added] With this in mind, it seems to me that the best and most parsimonious way to conceptualize the research finding is that children who have poor social skills will, in many cases, grow up to be adults with poor social skills. In particular, there seems to me no justification (other than psychiatric dogmatism) to conceptualize the matter in medical terms, and to impose a medical framework – "a marker of vulnerability" – on the data.

Contemporary empirical research explores new ways to conceptualize and heal racial trauma through anticolonial and sociohistorical lenses.

A new NIH-funded study suggests that children from low-income environments are more likely to have neurological impairments. The researchers claim that these neurodevelopmental issues are “distinct from the risk of cognitive and emotional delays known to accompany early-life poverty.”

According to a study published in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry, people diagnosed with depression in high-income countries are more likely to limit...

From FEE: School may have a negative impact on children's and teens' mental health: children's psychiatric emergency room visits drop precipitously over the summer and increase...

Acknowledging the role of trauma inflicted by a given individual’s mother is not the same as laying all blame for “mental illness” at the feet of motherhood. Meanwhile, a mountain of evidence has accumulated linking schizophrenia to sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and many other categories of adverse childhood experiences.

From The Guardian: At age 17, Nicole Kluemper came to be one of the most controversial cases in modern psychology when she recovered memories of...

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

From the Stamford Advocate: Increasing numbers of students have been affected by trauma; almost half of American adolescents have experienced an adverse childhood event. It...

From The British Psychological Society: BBC Horizon's recent documentary "Why Did I Go Mad?" has been monumental in changing the biomedical paradigm of mental illness....