10 ms·

A possible link between childhood trauma and Alzheimer disease

139 points by JPLeRouzic 5y ago

S_A_P 5y ago
I am of the opinion that many people have experienced childhood trauma in one form or another, and generally speaking few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy. Is there a particular type of "trauma" here? Are we saying those who've been abused physically, mentally or sexually? Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time?
- hirako2000 5y ago
  I think we are talking about a link that can be observed on some statistical analysis done on survey results from samples without blinds. Pointing out the link isn't quite enough to publish anything, so we add some of the buzzwords that trend well, RNA here and there usually satisfies demand. It doesn't demonstrate anything but it justifies research spendings, salary and stipends of those two researchers groups, the universities also got to be mentioned, given what they are going through it may help acquire more leads to occupy next terms seats.
- thedmstdmstdmst 5y ago
  Most people start from a place where they say "I am completely normal and everything I do is normal" and reason from there. For a person to acknowledge their trauma they must be wanting to be free of it and at least be able to see them themselves for who they truly are. Your idea that most people have experienced trauma growing up of some form, but few want to admit to such really does not surprise me. What is with the "particular type of trauma" idea? While they are not the same at all I don't see the value in any hierarchy of trauma. Trauma is an individual's inability to cope with an experience.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    Trauma is categorized to cater the treatment to the wound.
    - thedmstdmstdmst 5y ago
      Yes, certainly.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I imagine one could make an objective survey (has X happened to you) and then correlate it with later life outcomes. Presumably someone has, since it seems like an obvious way to measure the effect of trauma.
  - ntlk 5y ago
    This objective survey is called Adverse Childhood Experience and has been statistically correlated to problems in later life. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean?t=1622618242587 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/3870079...
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  I haven’t yet read the study but one thing I would assume should have great effects is: Anything that causes long lasting ptsd like simptoms, where you are constantly afraid, or have triggers which make you afraid. This exposes you to a lot of adrenaline and other who-knows-what hormones in a period where your brain is still in heavy development. I have little idea about these things, apart from the fact that I had a traumatic childhood, and developed MS, which is a disease that also has some link with what happens to you before the age 15 (how far you live to the equator therefore in theory how D3 deficient you grow up before the age 15 is significantly correlated with the chance of developing the disease)
  - sonofhans 5y ago
    That's fascinating. I've never read about a childhood trauma-MS link before. I experienced the former and still have the latter. Have you read about this anywhere? It sounds like you've thought about it, anyway. What else do you think?
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      This is just a random thought I cannot back it with anything. Scientists have a hard time figuring out the cause, maybe because the slow vague onset of the disease? When I first had my symptoms which made diadnosis possible I already had a couple of demyelinated lesions. Did they show up the days before? Or years ago? Who knows. You cannot do daily mri scans of a large enough population to catch even 1 patient at exactly the beginning of their disease, and even if you catch it, how can you gather useful information non-invasively? Anyways, I try reading scientific papers, and avoid the overhyped “eat this to cure your MS” type articles. They are so confident in everything, but of the 100 of real studies I’ve looked at, almost none of them had any surefire way to slow disease progression, some of the findings even contradict popular belief. For example eating whole grains, drinking wine in moderation and drinking coffe may have a small positive effect, instead of cutting out all gluten. Or it might just be a currelation in a way that wine drinkers have a higher socioeconomical status, which they tried correcting for, but they missed some unknown factor anyway? Just try doing the regular healthy lifestyle; good food, some moderate excercise, no stress.. Because you can still get all the other lifestyle diseases ontop of MS as anyone else, and as we are more vulnerable we need to be more careful.
- mlang23 5y ago
  > Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time? I hope not. Death is something you have to learn to cope with at some point. If we call that already a trauma, I think we have a rather big problem. And I am saying this because I have experience with it. I had my father and my aunt die in their 30s, when I was around 13. That was unpleasant, but still from the "such is life" category.
  - voisin 5y ago
    Having your father die at such a young age is certainly considered to be traumatic but a lot depends on your feeling if safety and connection to another adult.
    - mlang23 5y ago
      I had almost no connection to my mother, so you might like to call it traumatic. However, I was not telling my whole story. The reality is, I have a disability since childhood, so I always had "more complicated" problems then death to deal with. Thats why I insist calling the death of a family member trauma is exaggregation. There are things in life which are far more problematic to deal with.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    We all experience trauma eventually. Death is one we'll all see. Saying it is not traumatic is unhelpful. Acknowledging that it is traumatic, and helping people out who are experiencing it for the first time is exactly how people "learn to cope with it".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- newdude116 5y ago
  I think this is a serious question. I think everybody takes things differently. Genetics? Not everybody gets PTSD. So how you define "trauma"?
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  A common metric is the ACE test. Consider how many ACEs a child has experienced, over what time periods they occurred, and how their family responded to them. A child with many ACEs and a family that didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t respond to these experiences is worse off than a kid whose family immediately took corrective action, generally. >Abuse includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in childhood. Household dysfunction includes growing up with domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness in the home, parental divorce or separation, and incarceration. https://www.health.state.mn.us/docs/communities/ace/acereport.pdf https://www.health.state.mn.us/docs/communities/ace/acerepor... (PDF)
  - andruby 5y ago
    The pdf doesn't load here. I had to look it up, ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
      Sorry about that. The pdf does still load for me though.
      - justinclift 5y ago
        The PDF load here (Australia), if that's helpful, so it's not a broken link.
    - suifbwish 5y ago
      The other thing that tends to go unnoticed is that many people at a very young age experience the death of a dear loved one they were deeply bonded with. This can have profound and unimaginable effects on the stability of their psychology in ways that are poorly understood. It’s very possible for ones own internal primitive neural structures to permanently throw themselves completely out of chemical balance through self inflicted damage through stress mechanisms caused by the activity of these structure. The reason this is possible is because the most physiologically potent aspects of the limbic system develop well before the prefrontal and other more modern structures can completely solidify. Because these structures are grow slower and are more elaborate, the homeostasis necessary for their stable growth is much more delicate. There are likely periods of chemical vulnerability during development that can act as transformation pathways of the entire development of the advanced structures. They will continue to express their growth/maturation genes and develop in some way but it leads to a completely different operational configuration and also one that relies heavily on conceptual and even chemical aspects of the external environment for internal conceptual and chemical stability. The one of the main functions of limbic system is the main component in the fear/flight/fright mechanism. This system exists because its operation of generating chaotic action and bias of reaction has in some way granted its host a significant increased statistical advantage toward surviving and reproducing whereas, although it can make a big difference, the more advanced structures have not adapted the capability of continued existence as a species on its own. Natural selection favors whatever social genetic traits confer an increased rate of survival of an organism to reproductive maturity and then what personally governing traits lead the individual to reproduce. It is fair to presume that all traits of the human mind developed completely for only two purposes, to reproduce and to behave in ways that ensure your offsprings survival which unintentionally contributes to widespread survival advantage of humans outside ones family, increasing the chances that there will be similar individuals to confer a symmetrical advantage in return. Pretty much a cloud of increased likelihood for the species as a whole in that area to survive. Pretty much everything we think is important in society can be traced down the bias in the limbic systems chaos system
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I am of the opinion that many people have experienced childhood trauma in one form or another Especially in the irrelevant overblown form, nobody 50 years ago would even stoop down to mention as trauma...
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    > Especially in the irrelevant overblown form, nobody 50 years ago would even stoop down to mention as trauma... The Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch is 53 years old, a parody of old men apparently exaggerating their traumas.
    - clevergadget 5y ago
      Yeah putting 50 years in prev comment just demonstrates out of touch. Hasn't updated his 'how long ago' numbers since 2000
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - coldtea 5y ago
        If the parent's example was what I was talking about, then a "plus 20" years adjustment on my part wouldn't fix anything, since people have been doing the "four yorkshiremen" style thing not just 70 years ago, but since forever (and still do). But that (the parent's example) is not what I claimed people didn't do 50 years ago. If anything, it's the opposite. In the "four workshiremen" sketch they take pride in their traumas/harsh situations that they went through, and compete to exaggerate even greater traumatic/harsh situations. Today many people exaggreate irrelevant slights as traumas, and do so in order play the victim, not the tough survivor.
        whydoibother 5y ago
        Nice cynical, cruel take. It says more about you that you believe people who speak about their trauma are only doing it to play victim. You ever wonder how trauma is passed through generations? Because of the premise you are saying: people in denial about a trauma they experienced. They assume the shitty experiences they had are normal and then repeat the same acts that were visited upon them. In my reading about cptsd during my counseling (uh oh, am I playing a victim?) one of the most common thoughts identified in childhood trauma is downplaying the severity and assuming it is common. That leads to people not seeking treatment. Try showing some compassion and assume good faith.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy. Did you indeed mean "without"? (Or did you mean "with", as in: "few people want to admit to have grown up with tragedy"?) (Not a native speaker, maybe I'm missing something) If so, I wonder, what are reasons people want to tell others that they grew up with tragedy? (I wonder what "tragedy" means in your text, eg an alcoholic parent or getting beaten or ... A grandparent died? Quite different things, the word can mean)
throwaway803453 5y ago
I'd like to share a perspective that I can't reconcile. I'll start with a quick list of personal childhood(6-16 year old?) trauma: sexual abuse at 12 by a sadistic man 3 times my size that I feared, getting hit with a baseball bat in two separate incidents the second time fracturing a vertebrae, at 12 having an adult hit me so hard it fractured my sternum (to this day my chest has a bony ridge), losing 3 close childhood friends starting at age 10, watching a woman's head get run over by a city bus at age 6. Getting beaten so badly by a gang that my eyelid has a permanent droop (the girls mocked my new asymmetry) Watching a neighbor who I liked get stabbed in the neck and then beg for mercy (he had gambling debts) when I was 10. I could go on. Oddly, at the time none of the above "traumatized" me because the media, movies about NYC and the mob, Catholic school (lots of torture pictures in our study book), other friends experiences, etc. set my expectations that violence and sadism against boys/men is normal and that I am lucky to not have gotten worse. I didn't start to feel anger or trauma until I went away to college in the early 90's and no one seemed to have similar stories. Not even close. Oddly living somewhere safe with decent people made me bitter and resentful. What I can't reconcile is that my new friends genuinely felt bad for me in a way that my NYC buddies didn't. And that somehow created the trauma. Is that typical ? And does that imply that an avoidance strategy, or a wise-cracking support group, might have better mental health outcomes than time with an empathetic therapist ? "Overall, education seems the most important mediator." according the article. Good thing I got that Masters degree.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I have no idea, but it seems worth exploring deeply.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  It’s a delicate subject to discuss, to say the least. There has been some tangential research in this area, but most researchers want to avoid the perception of questioning anyone’s response to or definition of trauma. We do know that the language used to describe a situation can have profound effects on the perceived severity. There is a famous study in which subjects were shown footage of cars crashing into each other and asked to estimate the speed of the collision. It turns out that the way the collision is described has a significant effect on the estimate of the speed. For example, asking someone how fast the cars “smashed” into each other results in more severe estimates than if you ask how fast the cars “collided”. There has been extrapolation to suggest that merely reframing events as traumas is enough to amplify their severity, which could unfortunately create unhelpful negative feedback loops when others are merely trying to help. There is also a trend toward younger generations feeling that their lives are more due to fate or random chance than their own actions. Reframing outcomes as traumas inherently shifts the outcome to something that is inflicted upon us. Is it possible that prior to your friends’ reframing of those events you viewed the outcomes more as your own successful navigation out of (obviously terrible) random events? Reframing events as traumas can shift the perspective to one of being a helpless victim rather than an active navigator.
brainzap 5y ago
it was sleep all along
codepunker 5y ago
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/70267/ https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/70267/
sschueller 5y ago
Wouldn't that mean that we should see a spike of Alzheimers in countries ravaged by war like the ones in Africa? Yet that does not seem to be the case.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Might it be the case after adjusting for a much lower proportion of the population that reaches 80 years old+?
Finnotesorg 5y ago
Thanks. this article clarify many things!
krishnadevi 5y ago
Very interesting topic
whalesalad 5y ago
All roads point to glyphosate and big ag. We’re doing this to ourselves. https://zachbushmd.com https://zachbushmd.com has some enlightening thoughts on this topic.
- dhdc 5y ago
  Get that pseudoscience garbage out of here. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-pseudoscience/droning-preacher-mitochondrial-ecstasy https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-pseudosc...
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    Heh, that article is full of opinion and lacks evidence for many claims. The pot calling the kettle black? You underestimate the power of Monsanto to shape the narrative.
    - dhdc 5y ago
      Speaking of evidences, do you know that underlined texts are clickable? Also, please kindly point out any biases in the article if you can.
neom 5y ago
I would imagine it has to be somewhat severe trauma to create a physiological change? My parents went through an awful divorce but I was fine (6/7), shortly after we moved however, I was raped by the new neighbour for a period of time(12/13), less than a year after I developed vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder thought to be linked to childhood trauma.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  It might also be how supported or responsive your support systems were at the time. An awful divorce might be ameliorated if one or both parents still supported the child emotionally.
Drexelforce 5y ago
No doubt a connection. Post traumatic stress disorder is an established condition.
sethammons 5y ago
Childhood trauma that leads to toxic stress can have epigenetic affects and dramatically increases one’s chance for many illnesses and many causes of death. It is truly stunning. This is true even for those who feel like their trauma was no big deal (heck, others had it worse, right?) if they have a high ACE score (adverse childhood experiences). Nadine Burke Harris writes and talks about it and how a larger ACE score should be detected as part of normal health screenings for everyone because of its outsized influence on health. See https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_... or her book “The Deepest Well.”
- seg_lol 5y ago
  Trauma can impact sleep, sleep is necessary for cleaning and organizing the brain. Stress hormones prevent many autonomic processes from occurring on a normal cycle. It would make sense that external stressors could lead to diseases that rely on autonomic processes to run to completion. Make sure your /tmp stays clean folks or it could cause an outage.
grouphugs 5y ago
nazis, stop funding childhood trauma and genocide and start funding access to care
nautilus12 5y ago
This is so hard to quantify...what constitutes trauma? I feel like the premise is ill defined.

139 points by JPLeRouzic 5y ago

I am of the opinion that many people have experienced childhood trauma in one form or another, and generally speaking few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy. Is there a particular type of "trauma" here? Are we saying those who've been abused physically, mentally or sexually? Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time?

hirako2000 5y ago
I think we are talking about a link that can be observed on some statistical analysis done on survey results from samples without blinds. Pointing out the link isn't quite enough to publish anything, so we add some of the buzzwords that trend well, RNA here and there usually satisfies demand. It doesn't demonstrate anything but it justifies research spendings, salary and stipends of those two researchers groups, the universities also got to be mentioned, given what they are going through it may help acquire more leads to occupy next terms seats.
thedmstdmstdmst 5y ago
Most people start from a place where they say "I am completely normal and everything I do is normal" and reason from there. For a person to acknowledge their trauma they must be wanting to be free of it and at least be able to see them themselves for who they truly are. Your idea that most people have experienced trauma growing up of some form, but few want to admit to such really does not surprise me. What is with the "particular type of trauma" idea? While they are not the same at all I don't see the value in any hierarchy of trauma. Trauma is an individual's inability to cope with an experience.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  Trauma is categorized to cater the treatment to the wound.
  - thedmstdmstdmst 5y ago
    Yes, certainly.
bawolff 5y ago
I imagine one could make an objective survey (has X happened to you) and then correlate it with later life outcomes. Presumably someone has, since it seems like an obvious way to measure the effect of trauma.
- ntlk 5y ago
  This objective survey is called Adverse Childhood Experience and has been statistically correlated to problems in later life. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean?t=1622618242587 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/3870079...
faeyanpiraat 5y ago
I haven’t yet read the study but one thing I would assume should have great effects is: Anything that causes long lasting ptsd like simptoms, where you are constantly afraid, or have triggers which make you afraid. This exposes you to a lot of adrenaline and other who-knows-what hormones in a period where your brain is still in heavy development. I have little idea about these things, apart from the fact that I had a traumatic childhood, and developed MS, which is a disease that also has some link with what happens to you before the age 15 (how far you live to the equator therefore in theory how D3 deficient you grow up before the age 15 is significantly correlated with the chance of developing the disease)
- sonofhans 5y ago
  That's fascinating. I've never read about a childhood trauma-MS link before. I experienced the former and still have the latter. Have you read about this anywhere? It sounds like you've thought about it, anyway. What else do you think?
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    This is just a random thought I cannot back it with anything. Scientists have a hard time figuring out the cause, maybe because the slow vague onset of the disease? When I first had my symptoms which made diadnosis possible I already had a couple of demyelinated lesions. Did they show up the days before? Or years ago? Who knows. You cannot do daily mri scans of a large enough population to catch even 1 patient at exactly the beginning of their disease, and even if you catch it, how can you gather useful information non-invasively? Anyways, I try reading scientific papers, and avoid the overhyped “eat this to cure your MS” type articles. They are so confident in everything, but of the 100 of real studies I’ve looked at, almost none of them had any surefire way to slow disease progression, some of the findings even contradict popular belief. For example eating whole grains, drinking wine in moderation and drinking coffe may have a small positive effect, instead of cutting out all gluten. Or it might just be a currelation in a way that wine drinkers have a higher socioeconomical status, which they tried correcting for, but they missed some unknown factor anyway? Just try doing the regular healthy lifestyle; good food, some moderate excercise, no stress.. Because you can still get all the other lifestyle diseases ontop of MS as anyone else, and as we are more vulnerable we need to be more careful.
mlang23 5y ago
> Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time? I hope not. Death is something you have to learn to cope with at some point. If we call that already a trauma, I think we have a rather big problem. And I am saying this because I have experience with it. I had my father and my aunt die in their 30s, when I was around 13. That was unpleasant, but still from the "such is life" category.
- voisin 5y ago
  Having your father die at such a young age is certainly considered to be traumatic but a lot depends on your feeling if safety and connection to another adult.
  - mlang23 5y ago
    I had almost no connection to my mother, so you might like to call it traumatic. However, I was not telling my whole story. The reality is, I have a disability since childhood, so I always had "more complicated" problems then death to deal with. Thats why I insist calling the death of a family member trauma is exaggregation. There are things in life which are far more problematic to deal with.
- codingdave 5y ago
  We all experience trauma eventually. Death is one we'll all see. Saying it is not traumatic is unhelpful. Acknowledging that it is traumatic, and helping people out who are experiencing it for the first time is exactly how people "learn to cope with it".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
newdude116 5y ago
I think this is a serious question. I think everybody takes things differently. Genetics? Not everybody gets PTSD. So how you define "trauma"?
Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
A common metric is the ACE test. Consider how many ACEs a child has experienced, over what time periods they occurred, and how their family responded to them. A child with many ACEs and a family that didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t respond to these experiences is worse off than a kid whose family immediately took corrective action, generally. >Abuse includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in childhood. Household dysfunction includes growing up with domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness in the home, parental divorce or separation, and incarceration. https://www.health.state.mn.us/docs/communities/ace/acereport.pdf https://www.health.state.mn.us/docs/communities/ace/acerepor... (PDF)
- andruby 5y ago
  The pdf doesn't load here. I had to look it up, ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    Sorry about that. The pdf does still load for me though.
    - justinclift 5y ago
      The PDF load here (Australia), if that's helpful, so it's not a broken link.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    The other thing that tends to go unnoticed is that many people at a very young age experience the death of a dear loved one they were deeply bonded with. This can have profound and unimaginable effects on the stability of their psychology in ways that are poorly understood. It’s very possible for ones own internal primitive neural structures to permanently throw themselves completely out of chemical balance through self inflicted damage through stress mechanisms caused by the activity of these structure. The reason this is possible is because the most physiologically potent aspects of the limbic system develop well before the prefrontal and other more modern structures can completely solidify. Because these structures are grow slower and are more elaborate, the homeostasis necessary for their stable growth is much more delicate. There are likely periods of chemical vulnerability during development that can act as transformation pathways of the entire development of the advanced structures. They will continue to express their growth/maturation genes and develop in some way but it leads to a completely different operational configuration and also one that relies heavily on conceptual and even chemical aspects of the external environment for internal conceptual and chemical stability. The one of the main functions of limbic system is the main component in the fear/flight/fright mechanism. This system exists because its operation of generating chaotic action and bias of reaction has in some way granted its host a significant increased statistical advantage toward surviving and reproducing whereas, although it can make a big difference, the more advanced structures have not adapted the capability of continued existence as a species on its own. Natural selection favors whatever social genetic traits confer an increased rate of survival of an organism to reproductive maturity and then what personally governing traits lead the individual to reproduce. It is fair to presume that all traits of the human mind developed completely for only two purposes, to reproduce and to behave in ways that ensure your offsprings survival which unintentionally contributes to widespread survival advantage of humans outside ones family, increasing the chances that there will be similar individuals to confer a symmetrical advantage in return. Pretty much a cloud of increased likelihood for the species as a whole in that area to survive. Pretty much everything we think is important in society can be traced down the bias in the limbic systems chaos system
coldtea 5y ago
>I am of the opinion that many people have experienced childhood trauma in one form or another Especially in the irrelevant overblown form, nobody 50 years ago would even stoop down to mention as trauma...
- teachingassist 5y ago
  > Especially in the irrelevant overblown form, nobody 50 years ago would even stoop down to mention as trauma... The Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch is 53 years old, a parody of old men apparently exaggerating their traumas.
  - clevergadget 5y ago
    Yeah putting 50 years in prev comment just demonstrates out of touch. Hasn't updated his 'how long ago' numbers since 2000
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - coldtea 5y ago
      If the parent's example was what I was talking about, then a "plus 20" years adjustment on my part wouldn't fix anything, since people have been doing the "four yorkshiremen" style thing not just 70 years ago, but since forever (and still do). But that (the parent's example) is not what I claimed people didn't do 50 years ago. If anything, it's the opposite. In the "four workshiremen" sketch they take pride in their traumas/harsh situations that they went through, and compete to exaggerate even greater traumatic/harsh situations. Today many people exaggreate irrelevant slights as traumas, and do so in order play the victim, not the tough survivor.
      - whydoibother 5y ago
        Nice cynical, cruel take. It says more about you that you believe people who speak about their trauma are only doing it to play victim. You ever wonder how trauma is passed through generations? Because of the premise you are saying: people in denial about a trauma they experienced. They assume the shitty experiences they had are normal and then repeat the same acts that were visited upon them. In my reading about cptsd during my counseling (uh oh, am I playing a victim?) one of the most common thoughts identified in childhood trauma is downplaying the severity and assuming it is common. That leads to people not seeking treatment. Try showing some compassion and assume good faith.
cutemonster 5y ago
> few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy. Did you indeed mean "without"? (Or did you mean "with", as in: "few people want to admit to have grown up with tragedy"?) (Not a native speaker, maybe I'm missing something) If so, I wonder, what are reasons people want to tell others that they grew up with tragedy? (I wonder what "tragedy" means in your text, eg an alcoholic parent or getting beaten or ... A grandparent died? Quite different things, the word can mean)

throwaway803453 5y ago

I'd like to share a perspective that I can't reconcile. I'll start with a quick list of personal childhood(6-16 year old?) trauma: sexual abuse at 12 by a sadistic man 3 times my size that I feared, getting hit with a baseball bat in two separate incidents the second time fracturing a vertebrae, at 12 having an adult hit me so hard it fractured my sternum (to this day my chest has a bony ridge), losing 3 close childhood friends starting at age 10, watching a woman's head get run over by a city bus at age 6. Getting beaten so badly by a gang that my eyelid has a permanent droop (the girls mocked my new asymmetry) Watching a neighbor who I liked get stabbed in the neck and then beg for mercy (he had gambling debts) when I was 10. I could go on. Oddly, at the time none of the above "traumatized" me because the media, movies about NYC and the mob, Catholic school (lots of torture pictures in our study book), other friends experiences, etc. set my expectations that violence and sadism against boys/men is normal and that I am lucky to not have gotten worse. I didn't start to feel anger or trauma until I went away to college in the early 90's and no one seemed to have similar stories. Not even close. Oddly living somewhere safe with decent people made me bitter and resentful. What I can't reconcile is that my new friends genuinely felt bad for me in a way that my NYC buddies didn't. And that somehow created the trauma. Is that typical ? And does that imply that an avoidance strategy, or a wise-cracking support group, might have better mental health outcomes than time with an empathetic therapist ? "Overall, education seems the most important mediator." according the article. Good thing I got that Masters degree.

germinalphrase 5y ago
I have no idea, but it seems worth exploring deeply.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
It’s a delicate subject to discuss, to say the least. There has been some tangential research in this area, but most researchers want to avoid the perception of questioning anyone’s response to or definition of trauma. We do know that the language used to describe a situation can have profound effects on the perceived severity. There is a famous study in which subjects were shown footage of cars crashing into each other and asked to estimate the speed of the collision. It turns out that the way the collision is described has a significant effect on the estimate of the speed. For example, asking someone how fast the cars “smashed” into each other results in more severe estimates than if you ask how fast the cars “collided”. There has been extrapolation to suggest that merely reframing events as traumas is enough to amplify their severity, which could unfortunately create unhelpful negative feedback loops when others are merely trying to help. There is also a trend toward younger generations feeling that their lives are more due to fate or random chance than their own actions. Reframing outcomes as traumas inherently shifts the outcome to something that is inflicted upon us. Is it possible that prior to your friends’ reframing of those events you viewed the outcomes more as your own successful navigation out of (obviously terrible) random events? Reframing events as traumas can shift the perspective to one of being a helpless victim rather than an active navigator.

brainzap 5y ago

it was sleep all along

codepunker 5y ago

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/70267/ https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/70267/

sschueller 5y ago

Wouldn't that mean that we should see a spike of Alzheimers in countries ravaged by war like the ones in Africa? Yet that does not seem to be the case.

fighterpilot 5y ago
Might it be the case after adjusting for a much lower proportion of the population that reaches 80 years old+?

Finnotesorg 5y ago

Thanks. this article clarify many things!

krishnadevi 5y ago

Very interesting topic

whalesalad 5y ago

All roads point to glyphosate and big ag. We’re doing this to ourselves. https://zachbushmd.com https://zachbushmd.com has some enlightening thoughts on this topic.

dhdc 5y ago
Get that pseudoscience garbage out of here. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-pseudoscience/droning-preacher-mitochondrial-ecstasy https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-pseudosc...
- whalesalad 5y ago
  Heh, that article is full of opinion and lacks evidence for many claims. The pot calling the kettle black? You underestimate the power of Monsanto to shape the narrative.
  - dhdc 5y ago
    Speaking of evidences, do you know that underlined texts are clickable? Also, please kindly point out any biases in the article if you can.

neom 5y ago

I would imagine it has to be somewhat severe trauma to create a physiological change? My parents went through an awful divorce but I was fine (6/7), shortly after we moved however, I was raped by the new neighbour for a period of time(12/13), less than a year after I developed vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder thought to be linked to childhood trauma.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
It might also be how supported or responsive your support systems were at the time. An awful divorce might be ameliorated if one or both parents still supported the child emotionally.

Drexelforce 5y ago

No doubt a connection. Post traumatic stress disorder is an established condition.

sethammons 5y ago

Childhood trauma that leads to toxic stress can have epigenetic affects and dramatically increases one’s chance for many illnesses and many causes of death. It is truly stunning. This is true even for those who feel like their trauma was no big deal (heck, others had it worse, right?) if they have a high ACE score (adverse childhood experiences). Nadine Burke Harris writes and talks about it and how a larger ACE score should be detected as part of normal health screenings for everyone because of its outsized influence on health. See https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_... or her book “The Deepest Well.”

seg_lol 5y ago
Trauma can impact sleep, sleep is necessary for cleaning and organizing the brain. Stress hormones prevent many autonomic processes from occurring on a normal cycle. It would make sense that external stressors could lead to diseases that rely on autonomic processes to run to completion. Make sure your /tmp stays clean folks or it could cause an outage.

grouphugs 5y ago

nazis, stop funding childhood trauma and genocide and start funding access to care

nautilus12 5y ago

This is so hard to quantify...what constitutes trauma? I feel like the premise is ill defined.