2023-08-25 03:20:00
The effects of psychological trauma on physical and mental health are proven. Specifically, having experienced a trauma in childhood is associated with a greater probability of suffering from obesity, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease and many types of cancer. Although it has been hard for us to admit it, we already believe it: the (traumatic) environment influences the mind; and the mind in the body, and vice versa. For this reason, the doctors of the 21st century must know more and more about emotions and experiences (the new narrative medicine), and psychologists must know better the neuroendocrine responses to stress, its influence on the immune system. In short, the biological substrate that makes “mind” not an abstract entity that comes out of nowhere, but a very interesting organism resulting from evolution.
The effects of the trauma on the mental life of the subject are even more evident: it multiplies the risk of smoking by 3, the risk of consuming illicit substances by 11, the risk of suffering from depression by 4 and the risk of suicide by 2.5. Something happens in the infant brain subjected to trauma that seems to disrupt its adaptation and survival mechanisms. In neuroimaging studies we see how the gray matter of the hippocampus and amygdala is reduced, and even how it can shorten areas of the chromosomes called telomeres, responsible for preventing the genetic material from breaking or being damaged.
More information:
The deleterious power of trauma, then, comes even the same mechanisms of genetic transmission (in the same way that genetics predisposes to certain reactions to trauma). To understand the biology of the mind we have to think circularly, understanding the complex feedback systems, the synergies between the multiple factors involved, analyzing the fit of the human organism in its microsystem.
But there is a story to how we have conceptualized trauma over the years. Even before Freud, there was talk of traumatic neuroses, generally confined to war wounds. The first psychoanalysis associated neuroses with traumatic experiences that included sexual abuse or maltreatment, but the terrible aftermath of the world wars once again sent trauma to the battlefront, or rather, to the hospital for survivors.
From the Shoah to Vietnam
Virginia Woolf unforgettablely described in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) the post-traumatic consequences of the poet who returns from the battlefield, with the deterioration and suicide of his character Septimus. The experiences of survivors of the Shoah such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Jean Améry placed the idea of trauma at the limit of what was imagined. But it was the Vietnam War, with its thousands of defeated veterans in need of psychological care, that gave rise to psychotraumatology, and from which post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, first accepted in 1980) emerged.
This pathology presents with recurrent distressing memories, nightmares, intense physiological reactions, efforts to avoid situations similar to the traumatic one, and altered affect. Today we know that PTSD is just one of the post-traumatic routes that an individual can have, and that many others develop depression, bulimia, psychosis or borderline personality disorder.
So what is trauma and what is not? Initially, it is “an extreme situation, which endangers the life or integrity of the subject, lived with intense terror or defenselessness”, which includes being the victim of a terrorist attack, physical assault or rape, surviving a natural catastrophe or a serious traffic accident. But in the definition of recent years, the objective fact that takes place has been losing importance and the subjective experience, the associated feelings of horror, helplessness or abandonment, have gained prominence.
Thus, recent trauma scales actually refer to “adverse events”, including situations of discrimination, poverty, living with a mentally ill person or having a family member go to prison, for example. The concept of trauma has then been transformed into adverse situations experienced traumatically. The patient tells us that, for him, it was a trauma to be separated from his parents or prevented from having tattoos until he was 18, and, despite the fact that common sense makes it difficult to equate this adversity with witnessing the massacres in Rwanda, we can hardly add to their legitimate and respectable subjective experience.
Parallel to this hyperinflation of trauma, there is an expansion of adverse situations, which overwhelm what was previously called, more modestly, stressful. The thermostat of our time has gone out of adjustment. There are those who think that all this is a positive change, that it validates the respectable inner experience of people and questions —with some reason— who we are to give an opinion from the outside about what a trauma means. But there is also the risk that, if everything is trauma, nothing really ends up being trauma, and that we use the same term for totally disparate events, distorting and trivializing it.
This summer I read I come from that fear, by Miguel Ángel Oeste, a chilling testimony of brutal child abuse. He says: “I am no longer a child. However, the fear that overwhelms me continues to be the same as that suffered by the child I was”. James Rhodes recounted in Instrumental the chronic sexual abuse that left him with physical and mental scars, which were only attenuated by music. I wonder if using the word trauma too elastically, in the face of events of all kinds, with that hypertrophy of subjectivity that corresponds to our time, could imply a form of betrayal.
You can follow EL PAÍS Health and Wellness at Facebook, Twitter e Instagram.
1692957336
#mental #health #experience #trauma #adversity #Health #Wellness