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 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 that it is growing in response to and in reaction to my social and material environment and my lived 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.
Chronic Stress.
Repeated stress creates distortions in a 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, learning how to talk, poop in the right place at the appropriate time (becoming aware of our own bodies), moving hand and eye co-ordination, sensing and feeling others emotions and states of being, communicating, listening and hearing, to explore, investigating, understanding and relating to people and events in our lives.
There are body systems designed to deal with occasional stress, because being vulnerable in a dynamic environment, where there are dangers, is to say that unexpected accidents can happen, events can occur that demand rapid reactions, and the body has systems for such occasions.
Extended or chronic distortions of that happy state such as long term abuse, neglect, trauma, chronic stress, bullying etc at any stage from conception through to birth and infancy, and indeed at any time in life, will seriously damage the many systems within in the brain and throughout the body that are designed for short term stress management. We are designed to bounce back from the occasional stress situation.
The more incidents, the more the damage. Because we tend not to remember much of our childhoods, and because the damage is internal, as in neurological and hormonal and other physiological changes occur within the body itself, beyond our vision., a lot of the damage 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 associated with trauma and chronic stresses that are normalised emerge as characteristic of a given group, family, society, traits that would be symptomatic of the invisible distortions, expressed as attitudes and reactions that would be woven into their traditions, their biases, their fears and prejudices.*
(*for example, cultures that practice circumcision or female genital mutilation, people who are taught that war brings glory, that nationalist history justifies the wars that were won because they are a form of 'progress', and those parents who are happy for their children to enlist in military combat groups - all of these characteristics can be said to be cultural, rather than personal).
The biological basis of these realities would be invisible to parents who did not know this. There are time parents do not understand their child's behaviour, and it may have causation outside their awareness.
These dynamics would be invisible to the people about their own behaviour, which they would normalise - cultures where beating and slapping children is permitted, and is passed from generation to generation, and the adults will say 'Well, i was a bit wild, and I need that to show me to calm down!" is an example.
There are dynamics that ordinary people have no control over. Parents cannot be blamed for the stresses of poverty, war, abuse in their own lives, and in truth and all humility, most parents are decent, loving people who want to do the best, and they often 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 stressed situation, traumatised environment.
We are all just coping with it - adaptation to a pathology such as depression, or the desire to rape, murder, wield vast power is impossible. and utterly illogical in bio-logic terms...
Every war causes massive brain damage across the population who endure it, and that damage, being unresolved, perpetuates a stream of behavioural pathology that will inevitably feed back into the background of violence in that society. This is how the psychology of a hierarchically violent system develops.
So, the state of constant stress not a natural optimal physiological health state, it's certainly not psychologically healthy.
That children and the distressed are held responsible by society, that it is they who have something wrong with them which needs to be fixed is a huge issue.
And this is where the Religious, the Ideological and 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'. Do not ask what happened to this child that his or her behaviour has become so distorted.
Label the difficult child.
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 front line 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, children with no place left to go, abandoned, left to their own devices.
These are the kinds of children who are targeted by criminals for grooming into their networks, and to counter this, to offer hope they developed a trauma informed approach rather than a regulatory, sanction based approach. In providing an emotionally, non judgemental safe space as the starting point for building a relationship, 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 committed 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. Kids Company spent everything on ensuring the children's immediate needs were being met, without being judgemental or using sanction reward dynamics.
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 substantiated.
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, 5 years later we see knife crime, youth gangsters behaviour escalating. We see other front line services becoming underfunded, understaffed with 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 children, on average, over the past 50 years.
That tells me that the institutional denial of violence in our society is impacting children's lives within this society and that this is driving much of peoples material distress - this is a very stressful and harsh society.
I can easily extrapolate and imagine the lived experience of this dynamic across an entire population over time leading to very, very cruel traditions.
1. We can help people to recover, because we know that the brain is plastic, it's elastic, it's a constantly growing organ. Optimal healing requires the person who is suffering feels psychologically and materially safe.
One cannot recover when one is insecure, frightened, impoverished, and it is obvious that healing and recovery is less likely where any chronic stress is induced by external demands.
The cure for homelessness is to give the person a clean home, and to support them rebuilding relationships in their lives..
People in distress need kindness, they need material and emotional support more than they need prescribed diagnostic treatment protocols, mote than they need sanctions, regulatory systems and judgemental judicial approaches.
If we to do the job correctly, as the biology indicates, then we can help most people.
And for those who are unable to recover, those who are, for whatever reason too broken, then with a trauma informed approach we can care for them with greater compassion and understanding.
2. We can prevent this from happening in the first place, by giving all parents the time and support to chill with and bond/attach to their children in the biologically optimal manner. Supporting parenting more completely, especially during the first four years, will have a huge impact on life long health.
This will have a grounded healthful impact on society, and will save significant amounts of state resources into the future, and it will revolutionise Health Care Systems and Education systems
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.
