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Lightbulb Feb 29, 2020 at 08:36 AM
  #1
A group of professionals is now believing that "mental illness" is really dysfunctional adaptations to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) -- a kind of PTSD.. These adaptations are due to a combination of childhood stress -- mostly relations with their caregivers -- and the variations in genetic constitution inherent in living beings. Many of these adverse experiences could be called "abuse" by the parents, even though maybe that was not the original intent of the parents. Children typically cannot fathom why they are being hurt, and they cannot create adaptations favorable to becoming healthy adults. Effects of childhood maladaptations show up when they have to deal with the needs of adult life.

Freud originally decided from listening to his patients' stories that their symptoms were due to sexual abuse, but he encountered so much opposition to his ideas among the general public and many of his professional peers that he eventually gave up his ideas in favor of proposing that the patients' troubles were due to factors inherent to human beings that could not be changed. So the symptoms of distress that patients developed were due to things inside of them, and not due to how they were treated as children. People did not want to hear "horrible" stories of how children were treated. Even when those stories might be true.

The ideas that the problems of the mentally ill were due to factors inside of them, I think, dominated the mental health field for a long time, even up to the present day. Anything but how children were treated was favored as an explanation for "mental illness" -- for instance, "chemical imbalances in the brain". Since the causes were "broken brains" with chemical causes, then the correct treatment was also chemical. The seeming way in which some of these chemicals succeeded in controlling, or suppressing, symptoms, made it seem the explanations must be correct.

And since people opposed "blaming" parents, any alternative as an explanation was preferred. No one seemed to grasp that you could think that damaging treatment by parents is a cause is NOT necessarily the same as :"blaming" them.

In the early days, organizations such as NAMI were primarily for the interests of parents of the mentally ill, not necessarily interests of the mentally ill. Advocates such as E. Fuller Torrey and D. J. Jaffe stressed the needs of parents, and were at pains to deny that they had any adverse influences on their children. Torrey was eventually forced to leave NAMI because of his intolerant attitudes towards anyone who disagreed with him. Torrey had a sister who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and despite life-long treatment with drugs never recovered. Torrey is still often promoted to the general public as an expert on mental illness. He advocates involuntary treatment for the "seriously" mentally ill, since they may become "dangerous".

But now ACEs are gaining more favor as causes. Believing in Adverse Childhood Experiences does NOT mean "blaming" parents -- as they are most likely victims themselves. There is enough dysfunction in our society to explain the situation we find ourselves in.

These are my thoughts for the moment...

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Default Feb 29, 2020 at 02:39 PM
  #2
This article can hit home with a lot of individuals. May not be exact but have variations of:

What It's Like to Be a Complex Trauma Survivor of Narcissistic Abuse

Quote:
situations where the individual is held “captive” whether emotionally or physically, feels under the complete control of a perpetrator or multiple perpetrators and a perceived inability to escape the threatening situation.
For myself, I have shared how my entire childhood I was basically "captive" before I even understood what that meant when I stepped onto that school bus every day only to witness my older brother being picked on, ostracized, no one would sit with him and he had to endure all those nasty chants the whole way to school on that bus and I sat there watching him stare out the window trying to hide all the tears he often had running down his face. No one stopped it and I was only called X's sister so my entire childhood I did not really have my OWN identity. By the time I got to school I was stressed out, certainly not in a state of mind to sit and learn like the others.

I learned, but was actually afraid of doing too well because then it would be expected of me and I knew there was no way I could keep that up with all the stress I experienced both to that school and on the way home. I also knew that my older brother would get to a point where he needed to vent and that meant he might take his anger out on me. I then had to run and hide and climbed those very tall pines waiting until my mother got home from work. I knew I could not tell because all that would happen is my older brother would only be punished even more. I KNEW it was not his fault and I did not want to see him suffer any more than he already had been suffering.

That has ALWAYS been a trigger for me, witnessing someone being picked on or abused or hurt in some way and my not being able to stop it.

My older sister hated my brother right away, she wanted these other children to pick on him and make fun of him, she wanted me to do that as well and insisted if I played with him or was nice to him she would punish me.

If you don't do what I say, you will be punished.

Years later, my brother did notice how toxic my older sister is. He tried to be understanding about it even and said, "we don't know what she had to deal with before we came along and what messages she was expected to listen to".

Then when he witnessed how badly my sister treated me, he said "wow, she really is abusing you".

These past few years with my parents decline, I have relived things I never realized I could relive. I realize, I do suffer from complex ptsd due to so many traumas and abuse.

My parents did not realize how their behaviors hurt us. They thought they were good parents.

Last edited by Open Eyes; Feb 29, 2020 at 03:07 PM..
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Default Mar 18, 2020 at 01:19 PM
  #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by pachyderm View Post
A group of professionals is now believing that "mental illness" is really dysfunctional adaptations to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) -- a kind of PTSD.. These adaptations are due to a combination of childhood stress -- mostly relations with their caregivers -- and the variations in genetic constitution inherent in living beings. Many of these adverse experiences could be called "abuse" by the parents, even though maybe that was not the original intent of the parents. Children typically cannot fathom why they are being hurt, and they cannot create adaptations favorable to becoming healthy adults. Effects of childhood maladaptations show up when they have to deal with the needs of adult life.

Freud originally decided from listening to his patients' stories that their symptoms were due to sexual abuse, but he encountered so much opposition to his ideas among the general public and many of his professional peers that he eventually gave up his ideas in favor of proposing that the patients' troubles were due to factors inherent to human beings that could not be changed. So the symptoms of distress that patients developed were due to things inside of them, and not due to how they were treated as children. People did not want to hear "horrible" stories of how children were treated. Even when those stories might be true.

The ideas that the problems of the mentally ill were due to factors inside of them, I think, dominated the mental health field for a long time, even up to the present day. Anything but how children were treated was favored as an explanation for "mental illness" -- for instance, "chemical imbalances in the brain". Since the causes were "broken brains" with chemical causes, then the correct treatment was also chemical. The seeming way in which some of these chemicals succeeded in controlling, or suppressing, symptoms, made it seem the explanations must be correct.

And since people opposed "blaming" parents, any alternative as an explanation was preferred. No one seemed to grasp that you could think that damaging treatment by parents is a cause is NOT necessarily the same as :"blaming" them.

In the early days, organizations such as NAMI were primarily for the interests of parents of the mentally ill, not necessarily interests of the mentally ill. Advocates such as E. Fuller Torrey and D. J. Jaffe stressed the needs of parents, and were at pains to deny that they had any adverse influences on their children. Torrey was eventually forced to leave NAMI because of his intolerant attitudes towards anyone who disagreed with him. Torrey had a sister who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and despite life-long treatment with drugs never recovered. Torrey is still often promoted to the general public as an expert on mental illness. He advocates involuntary treatment for the "seriously" mentally ill, since they may become "dangerous".

But now ACEs are gaining more favor as causes. Believing in Adverse Childhood Experiences does NOT mean "blaming" parents -- as they are most likely victims themselves. There is enough dysfunction in our society to explain the situation we find ourselves in.

These are my thoughts for the moment...
This is a great article and I agree.
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Default Mar 18, 2020 at 01:23 PM
  #4
I think it's actually a mixture of nature and nurture. My parents made mistakes, I'm sure, but for me I think part of it is genetic and chemical. To me, that explains why meds work and therapy does not.
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Default Mar 19, 2020 at 07:13 AM
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Originally Posted by downandlonely View Post
I think it's actually a mixture of nature and nurture.
Yes, of course. Stresses can affect people with different constitutions differently.

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Default Mar 19, 2020 at 07:29 PM
  #6
Thanks for sharing


''No one seemed to grasp that thinking that damaging treatment from parents is a cause is not necessarily the same as ''blaming'' them''

It does not seem too hard to me to grasp that... I wonder why it appeared too hard for them.


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Default Mar 20, 2020 at 04:24 AM
  #7
I totally believe that environment can play a hug roll. I also firmly believe in the genetics or imbalances when it comes to mental illness. Its so hard for me to really decide if one is more impactful than another because so many mentally ill people have horrible childhoods. I wonder if its because they were mentally ill, undiagnosed as kids that made them targets or prone to abuse? But there are also people that have had normal childhoods but have difficult mental illnesses. They have done twin studies I think, where the environments were different but I cant remember the results of those studies I read long ago.
I know for me genetics played a huge role. My dad was what they used to call manic depressive. He was also an alcoholic and addict. I am bipolar II and became an alcoholic but no other addiction issues. But he was abusive to me and probably the catalyst for my mental illness. Even though I suspect I would have had some issues regardless I always wonder if it would have been as severe if my environment had been different. Very interesting topic!

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Default Mar 21, 2020 at 03:31 AM
  #8
Uh boy. Welp, personally, I view the brain as an extremely complex organ in which resides processes including, but certainly not limited to, emotions, memory, threat assessment, personal ethics/world view, and, of course, mood. There is also an unendingly complicated and not at all understood interplay between all these processes. There is actually no reason whatsoever that a memory should call up any particular emotion at all, but our wiring, for whatever reasons, allows for this. This is a big reason why trauma from long ago can be experienced as occurring (once again) in the present, when, in fact, it is not actually now reoccurring. It's (just) images from the past--along with a whole bunch of other stuff from other parts of the brain.

Bipolar 1 patients have been shown to do much, much better in terms of symptoms when they have some kind of reasonable social support network of some kind. I find that fascinating. Why on earth could emotional support from another human being have any bearing on a psychotic (or manic) process in my brain? No clue about that. But it does. which is great. It's why I love PC. It helps me feel better.

Anyhoo, the brain is extremely poorly understood. One's childhood/the sum of one's life experiences are obviously critical in a human's development. But in my own personal opinion, there is a heckuva lot more to mental illness than just that.

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Default Mar 21, 2020 at 02:26 PM
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pachy, I was the victim of emotional/psychological abuse. One therapist told me if I had not had a sibling, I would have become psychotic.
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Default Mar 21, 2020 at 04:04 PM
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Who hasn’t had adverse childhood experiences though?

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Default Mar 22, 2020 at 07:14 AM
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pachy, I was the victim of emotional/psychological abuse. One therapist told me if I had not had a sibling, I would have become psychotic.
I had one parent who was kind; it probably made all the difference.

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Default Mar 22, 2020 at 07:23 AM
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Environment plays a role but genetics and chemical imbalance and neurology cannot be denied as factors
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Default Mar 22, 2020 at 08:37 AM
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Environment plays a role but genetics and chemical imbalance and neurology cannot be denied as factors
Maybe it is cat diseases as Fuller Torrey claims.

Nothing can be denied when confusion reigns.

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Default Mar 23, 2020 at 11:48 PM
  #14
I come from 5 generations of people with schizophrenia. In my family the genetic component is so strong that a psychiatrist doing research at Johns Hopkins looking for genetically linked schizophrenia was very interested in studying my biofamily. My sister's psychiatrist in her group home knew about this researcher and strongly encouraged my parents, siblings and our children to give them genetic samples. I was willing. I'm a scientist and breaking the genetic code of schizophrenia is important to me. Unfortunately, my siblings, parents, and grand parent believed it was a government plot to manipulate their minds. They couldn't do the study with just my daughter and I. They needed all four living generations for samples.

I was crushed. I wanted all the severe trauma and neglect I suffered as a child to have a purpose. I wanted to be able to prevent some other child from growing up the way I did. When my biofamily said "no" to the research they denied future people with generational schizophrenia a chance for real help. Such a wasted opportunity.
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