WE ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR CHRONIC STRESS - NO ORGANISM AND NO LIVING SYSTEM IS.
The exquisite vulnerability of the hippocampus to the ravages of stress is one of the key translational neuroscience discoveries of the 20th century.
Sapolsky et al. provided early clues when they found that elevating corticosterone stress hormone levels into the high physiological range for an extended period reduced the number of hippocampal neurons in rats.
Further studies showed that the deleterious effects of glucocorticoids could occur in other regions but that the hippocampus was the primary target.
The outcomes of excessive exposure to glucocorticoids range from the reversible atrophy of dendritic processes and suppression of neurogenesis with acute exposure to frank neuronal death with chronic high-level exposure
The sensitivity of hippocampal neurons to stress and glucocorticoids has been confirmed in a host of other species, including nonhuman primates
This was, and remains a really important mainstream article.
Seven years old... pre-Brexit.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/15/how-child-abuse-primes-the-brain-for-future-mental-illness/
"Child maltreatment has been called the tobacco industry of mental
health. Much the way smoking directly causes or triggers predispositions
for physical disease, early abuse may contribute to virtually all types
of mental illness.
Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects
of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions
in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were
maltreated or neglected in childhood.
These changes may leave victimised children
more vulnerable to depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) as adults, the study suggests."
here is the study - https://www.pnas.org/content/109/9/E563
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I understood over three decades ago that my experience was written into my neurology as I developed, that my brain was and is always, always growing, and growing in response to and reaction to my social and material environment and my experience within those environments...
Any new practice creates a new neural network.
This is happening all the time.
Music as my practice teaches me this.
Gardening teaches me this.
Just as a state of contentment fosters healthy development, chronic stress distorts and inhibits development.
Repeated abuse creates distortions in the developing child's neural networks, and excess chronic cortisol, and other stress hormones, can kill or inhibit the growth of neural cells.
My childhood taught me this.
Our brains and indeed our bodies and minds need a generally contented background state in order to healthfully develop all our various functional skill sets - learning to walk, talk, poop in the right place, move hands and eye co-ordinated, sense, feel others, communicate, hear, to explore, investigate and understand and relate to. There are body systems designed to deal with occasional stress, because being vulnerable in a dynamic environment accidents can happen, events can occur that demand rapid reactions, and the body has systems for such occasions.
Extended or chronic dstortions of that happy state such as abuse, neglect, trauma, chronic stress, bullying etc at any stage from conception through to Birth and Infancy, and indeed at any time in life, would seriously damage the many systems within in the brain and throughout the body.
The more incidents, the more the damage. Much of it is invisible, in physiological terms, and it may take years, decades for symptoms of that distortion to emerge as disease states.
And because each person is of such unique nature, the outcomes will vary across a population, a family, a community...
That said we would be able to see patterns of behaviour emerge as characteristic of each group, family, society that would be symptomatic of invisible distortions, attitudes and reactions that would be woven into their traditions, their biases, their fears and prejudices... *
(*for example, circumcision, female genital mutilation and people who think War brings glory, that History justifies the wars because of progress, and who are happy for their children to enlist in military combat groups).
These biological realities would be all but invisible to parents who did not know this.
These dynamics would be invisible to the people about their own behaviour, which they would normalise - beating and slapping children is an example.
Parents cannot be blamed for the stresses of poverty, war, abuse in their own lives, and most are decent, loving people who want to do the best, and are stymied by the burden of social stressors.
Cycles of learned behaviour and chronic stress.
Behaviours emerging as a result of that socially mediated damage would be misread as the child's bad character, leading to a further compounding of the issues for both parent and child.
The very concept of Oppositional Defiance Disorder, as a diagnosis is an obvious deliberate error in that regard, an act of unimaginable cruelty.
History
This has been happening to children in this hierarchically violent culture for thousands of years, and we have not 'adapted' to it, to that situation, environment, we are all coping with it - adaptation to a pathology such as depression, or the desire to rape, murder, weild vast power is evolutionarily impossible. and utterly illogical in bio-logic terms...Every war causes massive brain damage across the popultion who endure it, and that damage, being unresolved, perpetuates a series of behavioural pathologies that feed back into the violence of the Institutional world. Thus the psychology of a hierchically violent system develops.
So, it's not a natural optimal physiological health state, it's certainly not psychologically healthy and it's certainly not neccessary that so many children's brains are so damaged.
That they are blamed by society which is where the Religious, the Ideological, the Authoritarian exerts so much force that adversely impacts the lives of children .... there is no escape, 'no child left behind' and this, of course, causes even more damage.
Blame the child who is stabbing another on the street.
Punish this damaged child. Demand he or she 'fits in'.
Make of the child a psychopath, an angry, abandoned, violent rage that kills for the pleasure of power. Create a broken person.
Provide no recognition of the child's lived experience and the kind of social setting he or she was born into, and how that afflicted the child.
An example from recent history.
The Conservative and Unionist Party and the Liberal Democrats started to close down "Kids Company", an organisation that pioneered 'trauma informed care' in frontline support for seriously at risk children, for over 13 years, with 6,000 active cases of at risk children on their books at the time of closure.
Let me clarify, Kids Company reached out to the most at risk children, on the edge of total breakdown, with no place left to go, children who are targetted by criminals for grooming into their networks, and by developing a trauma informed approach rather than a regulatory, sanction based approach, Kids Company helped thousands of children that Council and State provided services could not or would not deal with.
They were funded by Government funding, a total of £48 million of 13 years. They were funded to reach the most disturbed, wounded children who were clearly not accessing standard services State and Council Services.
They supported many thousands of children who would have been ignored until they became casualties, addicts, prostitutes, petty dealers, petty thieves..... or comitted suicide, or just coped in psychological agony for the rest of their lives.
Kids Company was funded almost entirely by Government grant.
They tended to spend every penny, and had very little 'reserves'....
They had a staff of 650, ran 11 full time centres across London and had centres in Bristol and other cities.. they spent everything on ensuring the children's needs were being met...
It was because these 'reserves' were not maintained in sufficient value that they drew attention from Government auditors post 2010, when the Conservative and Lib Dem Coalition took office.
There was a considerable campaign of media allegations of abuse, misuse of cash, failures in duty of care and accusations that they just fed money to criminal children, allegations which have never been substatiated.
In November 2015, the Public Accounts Committee described the
organisation as a failed "13 year experiment" and criticised both the
Labour and Conservative governments for continuing to give public money
to a private charity against civil service advice.
In 2019 we see knife crime, youth gangsters behaviour escalating, frontline services underfunded, frontline understaffed and complementary services being much more difficult to access and co-ordinate, all the time whilst being privatised - 'low wages leads to better economic efficiency.'
Is there a connection?
The standing army of youth offenders under 'care' runs to about 100,000 average over the past 50 years.
- when it is the institutional violence of this society that is driving so much of peoples material stress, militarily, economically and politically.
I can easily extrapolate and imagine the lived experience of this across an entire population over time leading to very, very cruel traditions...
We need to ensure, as we move into the future, that people live with an awareness that informs their decision to afford any degree of institutional power over others, in any situation. We have seen with the Catholic Church and others what happens when d
1. we can heal, as the brain is plastic, elastic, it's a constantly growing organ system, however optimal healing requires the person who is suffering feels psychologically and materialy safe.
One cannot recover when one is insecure, frightened, impoverished, and therefore healing is less likely where any chronic stress is induced by external demands.
Thus people in recovery need kindness, material and emotional support more than they need treatment protocols, sanctions, regulatory systems and judgementalism.
If we do the job correctly, as the biology indicates, then we can resolve for most people. and those who are unable, we can then care for them with greater compassion and understanding.
2. We can prevent this from happening in the first place, by giving parents the time and support to chill with and bond/attach in the biologically optimal manner...
This will have immense healthful impact on society, and will save immense amounts of state resources, it will revolutionise Health Care Systems and Education systems...
Media will have to be regulated so that deliberate triggering of behaviours we now better understand does not happen.
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
