A 16-year-old kid carries a gun into his high school before taking it out of his backpack and killing two students while injuring several others. When I look at the survivors in this tragedy, I see unceasing pain. The image of a young female student on the school bus revealed a concerned but scared look. I wondered if it was one of her friends that were killed. In another scene were parents and children seen crying in the aftermath of this mayhem. As usual, the school mentioned that would be school counselors that will be made available to help the students cope with this tragedy.
One of my Linkin connections is a recent college graduate that happened to be one of our daughter's good friends before Maria died in 2007. Kim graduated from Legacy Christian Academy, the same school ( different name) Maria attended until the end of her 4th-grade year. In one LinkIn post these words confirm all along my thoughts that we need to do a better job addressing the trauma needs of children.
"For grief especially, I think people write off kids as being resilient enough to bounce back, so they don’t worry as they would over an adult. Even if nothing major happened, sometimes kids are just going through a rough patch and could benefit from therapeutic support. Perhaps early intervention could even prevent lifelong mental health issues in adulthood."
This young lady is pursuing her Master's degree in Clinical Counseling and wants to make a difference in children and adults impacted by trauma. This builds to the recent findings from the Aces study.
In the 1980s, the dropout rate of participants at Kaiser Permanente's obesity clinic in San Diego, California, was about 50%; despite all of the dropouts successfully losing weight under the program.[2] Vincent Felitti, head of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, conducted interviews with people who had left the program, and discovered that a majority of 286 people he interviewed had experienced childhood sexual abuse. The interview findings suggested to Felitti that weight gain might be a coping mechanism for depression, anxiety, and fear.[2]
Felitti and Robert Anda from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) went on to survey childhood trauma experiences of over 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patient volunteers.[2] The 17,337 participants were volunteers from approximately 26,000 consecutive Kaiser Permanente members. About half were female; 74.8% were white; the average age was 57; 75.2% had attended college; all had jobs and good health care, because they were members of the Kaiser health maintenance organization.[3] Participants were asked about different types of childhood trauma that had been identified in earlier research literature:[4]
The conclusion from this study are as follows: The number of ACEs was strongly associated with adulthood high-risk health behaviors such as smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, and severe obesity, and correlated with ill-health including depression, heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease and shortened lifespan.[4][8][9] Compared to an ACE score of zero, having four adverse childhood experiences was associated with a seven-fold (700%) increase in alcoholism, a doubling of risk of being diagnosed with cancer, and a four-fold increase in emphysema; an ACE score above six was associated with a 30-fold (3000%) increase in attempted suicide.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_Study
We need to do a better job addressing the trauma needs of our children and young adults. A 16-year-old kid doesn't just go into a school and start killing kids. If one looks hard and long one might see a pattern of problematic behaviors going back several years. It could have been relentless bullying, or any number of issues revealed in the Ace's study.
The result of this study is a start toward understanding childhood trauma. As the study reveals, children are not as resilient as adults would like to think they are. They need help with processing the pain they feel within than simply be given a cookie and being told things will be all right.
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