D. J. O'Neill Memorial Regional Conference on Mission, Identity, and Ethics

An exposure to trauma increases the risk for 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death.

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Trauma whether experienced in the past or present has a profound effect on a person’s health. Often neither they nor the healthcare provider understands the effect it has on their behavior, physiology, and reactions.  Trauma informed care (TIC) is about learning and creating a treatment framework that involves understanding, recognizing and responding to the effects of all types of trauma. TIC involves a broad understanding of traumatic stress reactions and common responses to trauma. Providers need to understand how trauma can affect treatment presentation, engagement, and the outcome of behavioral health services. The impact of trauma can be subtle, insidious, or outright destructive. How an event affects an individual depends on many factors, including characteristics of the individual, the type and characteristics of the event(s), developmental processes, the meaning of the trauma, and sociocultural factors. It is important that healthcare professionals recognize the issue and learn what can be done to assist the patient in healing.

 

The TED Talk by Nadine Burke Harris: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime begins with the following paragraph:

“In the mid-'90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I'm talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It's childhood trauma.”

 

She goes on to say, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is something that everybody needs to know about. It was done by Dr. Vince Felitti at Kaiser and Dr. Bob Anda at the CDC, and together, they asked 17,500 adults about their history of exposure to what they called "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs. Those include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; parental mental illness, substance dependence, incarceration; parental separation or divorce; or domestic violence. For every yes, you would get a point on your ACE score. And then what they did was they correlated these ACE scores against health outcomes. What they found was striking. Two things: Number one, ACEs are incredibly common. Sixty-seven percent of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6 percent, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second thing that they found was that there was a dose-response relationship between ACEs and health outcomes: the higher your ACE score, the worse your health outcomes.”

 

For more information watch Nadine Burke Harris's  15 minute TED talk.