“We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly.
It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken in two: others, like himself, and those to be used.
He will never realize that he still has all of his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.”
-Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, 2002, page 345. Narvaez, D.,
How Modern Societies Violate Human Development: Violating what humans need and changing human nature., May 4, 2014.
Felitti, V. J. & R. F. Anda. (2005).
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente.
Feshbach, N.D. (1987).
Parental empathy and child adjustment/maladjustment. In N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer (Eds.) Empathy and Its Development (pp. 271-291). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sanchez, M.M., Ladd, C.O., & Plotsky, P.M. (2001).
Early adverse experience as a developmental risk factor for later psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 13 (3), 419-449.
Chapman, D. P., Dube, S. R., & Anda, R. F. (2007).
Adverse childhood events as risk factors for negative mental health outcomes. Psychiatric Annals, 37(5), 359.
Anisman, H., Zaharia, M.D., Meaney, M.J., & Merali, Z. (1998).
Do early-life events permanently alter behavioral and hormonal responses to stressors? International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 16(3-4), 149-164.
Dube, S. R., Fairweather, D., Pearson, W. S., Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., & Croft, J. B. (2009).
Cumulative childhood stress and autoimmune diseases in adults. Psychosomatic medicine, 71(2), 243.
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether childhood traumatic stress increased the risk of developing autoimmune diseases as an adult.
METHODS: Retrospective cohort study of 15,357 adult health maintenance organization members enrolled in the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study from 1995 to 1997 in San Diego, California, and eligible for follow-up through 2005. ACEs included childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; witnessing domestic violence; growing up with household substance abuse, mental illness, parental divorce, and/or an incarcerated household member. The total number of ACEs (ACE Score range = 0-8) was used as a measure of cumulative childhood stress. The outcome was hospitalizations for any of 21 selected autoimmune diseases and 4 immunopathology groupings: T- helper 1 (Th1) (e.g., idiopathic myocarditis); T-helper 2 (Th2) (e.g., myasthenia gravis); Th2 rheumatic (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis); and mixed Th1/Th2 (e.g., autoimmune hemolytic anemia).
RESULTS: Sixty-four percent reported at least one ACE. The event rate (per 10,000 person-years) for a first hospitalization with any autoimmune disease was 31.4 in women and 34.4 in men. First hospitalizations for any autoimmune disease increased with increasing number of ACEs (p < .05). Compared with persons with no ACEs, persons with >or=2 ACEs were at a 70% increased risk for hospitalizations with Th1, 80% increased risk for Th2, and 100% increased risk for rheumatic diseases (p < .05).
CONCLUSIONS: Childhood traumatic stress increased the likelihood of hospitalization with a diagnosed autoimmune disease decades into adulthood. These findings are consistent with recent biological studies on the impact of early life stress on subsequent inflammatory responses.
Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, et al.
Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study. Am J Prev Med 1998;14:245--58.
Brown DW, Anda RF, Henning T, et al.
Adverse childhood experiences and the risk of premature mortality. Am J Prev Med 2009;37:389--96.
Anda RF, Felitti VJ, Bremner JD, et al.
The enduring effects of abuse and related experiences in childhood: a convergence of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 2006;256:174--86.
Dong M, Anda RF, Felitti VJ, et al.
The interrelatedness of multiple forms of childhood abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Child Abuse Negl 2004;28;771-- 84.
Foley, D. E. (1997).
Deficit thinking models based on culture: The anthropological protest. The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice, 113-131.
Susan Rosenthal, "
Mental Illness or Social Sickness?", Chapter 3 of
SICK and SICKER: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care, May 18, 2008.
Children are especially vulnerable to deprivation and have a limited capacity to articulate what’s wrong. So they protest in the only ways they can – with symptoms and behaviors that alert us that something is wrong in their world...In most schools, youngsters are forced to sit still in closed rooms for long periods of time and memorize information that has no connection to their lives. The ones who fall behind can be labelled with Reading Disorder, Mathematics Disorder and Expressive Language Disorder. The restless, defiant ones can be labelled with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Disruptive Behavior Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Once labelled, these children can be forced to take toxic, mind-altering drugs. Even in families that can provide the material necessities of life, overstressed adults have insufficient time to meet their children’s emotional needs. When children protest by acting out, parents are encouraged (more often pressured) to consult doctors and other experts who “diagnose” these children, not the situation to which they are reacting.
Anxious youngsters who are not getting enough attention, or the right kind of attention, can be labelled with Separation Anxiety Disorder. Children who have suffered severe abandonment, abuse, trauma or neglect can be labelled Reactive Attachment Disorder. Although these children are reacting predictably to their plight, the DSM-IV declares them mentally ill. Such labels do nothing to change children’s situations so they can get what they need...No one is asking, “What do these children need, and how can we provide it?” To preserve a crazy-making system, the healthy, protesting child is labelled “crazy” and medicated into a subordinate, defeated child.Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., & Gleason, T. (2013).
The Value of Using an Evolutionary Framework for Gauging Children’s Well-Being. Evolution, early
experience and human development: From research to practice and policy, 3-30.
The evidence across animal, human psychological, neurobiological, and anthropological research is increasing and converging to demonstrate lifetime vulnerability of brain and body systems among those with poor early care. Even when medicines are available to alleviate symptoms of dysfunction, the underlying suboptimal structures remain. This problem may be particularly true for emotional and moral functioning. A host of public, personal, and social health problems that may have their roots in early experience have been skyrocketing in the United States and increasingly around the world (e.g.,psychological problems such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, anxiety, and depression, not to mention psychosomatic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and a variety of autoimmune disorders)....Mammals require abundant nurturing care for optimal postnatal development. Catarrhine mammals in particular require profound social care.Bio-Psychosocial View on Neurodegenerative Diseases, Part 1 of Dr. Gabor Mate's presentation on Neurodegenerative Diseases. For these presentations. Dr. Mate took a look at neurodegenerative diseases through a bio-psychosocial lens. Presented at the Annual International Restorative Medicine Conference.
"What has become plain to me, from reading anthropological accounts...analyzing our own childrearing practices and comparing outcomes, is that
Western culture has
extirpated the evolved grounding of moral rationality and moral development. This has been happening for some time but may be reaching its nadir. Historically in delayed-return societies (in contrast to Small Band Gatherer-Hunter immediate-return), an ideology of sacralized leadership and centralized authority emerged, with its accompanying control of women and young men by older men.
Those with power (older men)
fostered an ideology that established fixed relations among humans (e.g., institutionalized marriage). Fixed relations were given power over individual autonomy. Further, the possessions that accumulated with power were themselves imbued with mystical power over human autonomy (e.g., private property).
The pinnacle of this mythology is a capitalist system so powerful, pervasive and destructive that it ‘shall not be named’—it is taken as a baseline for how reality works so any questioning of its assumptions (e.g., competitiveness, self-interest, free markets) is considered absurd. Through an
emphasis on consumption and materialism US cultural narratives and societal practices have denigrated close maternal, familial and community care, as well as true individual autonomy and the self-development necessary for a confident social being...Trauma and undercare of children may be a primary cause of our differences. Undercare refers to the absence of ancestral caregiving practices in early life. Ancestral caregiving among humans represent slight variations to social mammalian parenting that emerged more than 30 million years ago: responsiveness to the needs of the child, constant touch, breastfeeding for at least 2 years, multiple adult caregivers, extensive positive social support for mother and child, free play in nature. These practices are related to optimal functioning physiologically, psychologically and morally.
All these practices have diminished over the 20th century in the USA. Widespread lack of social support for optimal early caregiving may be undermining all the rest of the practices as it leads to distracted and less responsive caregivers
that worsens by generation."
- Darcia Narvaez, The 99%: Development and Socialization within an Evolutionary Context: Growing Up to Become “A Good and Useful Human Being”.
