Article: EVE SIMMONS: Why I believe raking over the past ISN’T always good for our mental health

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Seventeen years after losing my father to cancer – a few days shy of my 13th birthday – I can still hear the nurse’s words: ‘Daddy’s gone, darling.’

Thankfully, somewhere along the way I managed to turn the volume down low enough so I could live a relatively normal adult life. Occasionally I think about that day – anniversaries and birthdays are the worst, as any person who lost a parent at a young age will tell you. But on the whole it is an experience that, while formative, I don’t think has left me particularly scarred.

So when, a decade after Dad died, a therapist sat opposite me asking me to revisit the moment, demanding I ‘face the trauma’, I was bewildered.
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I was there to address another, immediate problem – an eating disorder that had left me critically malnourished and hospitalised....
After six months, I was discharged. I wasn’t perilously underweight any more, but I certainly wouldn’t say I had recovered.

I am better now, but it wasn’t thanks to my well-meaning therapist. I owe it to a no-nonsense dietician who helped me understand the truth about nutrition, which helped me fight the thoughts that scared me off certain foods, and the unrelenting support of an online community I built for others with eating disorders
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Studies show that roughly two-thirds manage to recover without long-lasting difficulties. ‘The mere distraction of just getting on with things, the passing of time and social support from friends and loved ones can be hugely important in helping people cope with a traumatic event,’ says Dr Simon Wessely, regius professor of psychiatry at King’s College London. ‘We mustn’t underestimate this and think a psychotherapist is always necessary. Sometimes people like me can get in the way.’
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you said it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...tml?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490


(having spelled out the potential harms of one kind of therapy, the article says that "CBT is more effective" and preferred by the NHS, as a therapy. Yet there is no mention of similar potential harms caused by CBT, or that many physical illnesses are being attibuted to childhood trauma ).

eta:
In journal of Psychosomatic medicine from 2012
Childhood Trauma in Multiple Sclerosis
Conclusions
Our findings suggest an association between childhood trauma and MS in this cross-sectional study. Larger prospective longitudinal studies are needed to clarify the relationship between early-life stress and the risk for MS in genetically susceptible individuals.
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https://journals.lww.com/psychosoma...dhood_Trauma_in_Multiple_Sclerosis__A.12.aspx
 
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The article also says:

We see the same concept in other areas of medicine – this idea that, to truly treat an illness, you must find the root cause and tackle that. But in so many areas, from cancer to heart disease and even certain types of diabetes, doctors still don’t truly understand why they happen. That doesn’t mean they can’t find ways to help patients get better.
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No it doesn't mean they can't find ways to help patients get better but it also means that they can do the patient a lot of harm, even if well intentioned.

One simple example of type 1 insulin dependent diabetes since Simon brought diabetes up himself.

It was thought that type 1 diabetics needed extra sugar in their system to compensate for vigorous exercise. Recently I had a conversation with a niece who wears a monitoring device.

With more widespread use of such monitoring devices doctors realised the advice they gave wasn't correct. When people like my niece exercise the body compensates and releases glucose into the system.

The old advice of having a snack to compensate for glucose burned during exercise actually causes the blood sugar levels to go high. Something the patient is usually taught to go to great lengths to avoid. For a fitness fanatic like my niece who exercises nearly every day that's a lot of avoidable sugar highs.

So, in other areas of medicine at least, more information is nearly always better.

Edit - autocorrect
 
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OK, am I niave in asking, doesn't everyone have some early life stress?

And, what about that stress, how is it measured? Some have by many standards a terrible early life, and yet are the picture of health, or as near as.

I think some therapists can coax and drag out memories from youthful times which could be misrememberances.Granted some, or even a substantial number may have had terrible childhoods, but they don't all develop MS, ME etc.

Oh, and about that support from friends and family needed in times of trauma, trial, disability and so on,....."thanks" to the BPS'ers for churning out article after article about how pwME are delusional, "just depressed", lazy, deconditioned, threatening, potentially violent, vexatious, not ill at all, undeserving of help etc. This propaganda has helped to turn colleagues, family and friends away from many with ME. To say nothing of the trivializing label cfs.
 
People like the childhood trauma angle but it is clearly pointless.

The main reason they like it is that it implies that 'therapy' will help with whatever condition. Obviously this is innuendo, not solid reasoning. What matters is if there is evidence that a treatment helps a condition and studies of 'therapies' have failed to produce this evidence.

Furthermore, we don't need a link between adverse childhood events and 'physical' health problems. We already are against these because they are, by definition, obviously bad in and of themselves.

Their may well be a true association, but I don't see how it changes anything much. Other than people wasting time and money on unhelpful therapy and feeling guilty when they fail to improve or whatever.
 
Who defines what constitutes trauma?

Two people can suffer the same event, one can be traumatised while the other is not. It isn't necessarily that the traumatised individual is more sensitive or the other less.

Perhaps it's more about what else was going on in their lives at the time in combination with their previous life experiences and the attitudes of the people around them. Depending in their developmental stage a child won't necessarily be able to observe, judge and remember the whole picture so simply tugging at a noticeable thread in the weave of their whole background will just make it more noticeable and unravel things?

I could look at events in someone else's life and wonder how they kept going and equally other people could look at mine and think I was strong/brave/calm (& I'm not especially any of those) about things I haven't been all that bothered about.

So someone else picking through things is inevitably parsing through their own filter of what is traumatic and what isn't. Their filter won't necessarily match mine and vice versa.

Once again it's a gross oversimplification of something that is much more complex. First of all we can't be the best judge of what is traumatizing to other people, we can only support them if they feel traumatised and that is subjective.

Pinning something that is subjective to something else we don't understand, like some chronic illness or pain, is akin to using astrology to workout a person's personality traits.
 
The double thinking behind the childhood trauma as a cause of adult illness is nicely illustrated.

The psychiatric lobby rejected the association between CFS and a prior viral infection on the basis that everyone was subjected to numerous viruses every year, and the apparent relationship was merely an ex post facto explanation designed to minimise loss of self esteem.

Strangely they never seem to consider that most people undergo childhood trauma of some degree, if you look closely enough, but this seems insufficient to rebut their claims, for some reason, largely unfathomable.
 
chrisb said:
The double thinking behind the childhood trauma as a cause of adult illness is nicely illustrated.

The psychiatric lobby rejected the association between CFS and a prior viral infection on the basis that everyone was subjected to numerous viruses every year, and the apparent relationship was merely an ex post facto explanation designed to minimise loss of self esteem.

Strangely they never seem to consider that most people undergo childhood trauma of some degree, if you look closely enough, but this seems insufficient to rebut their claims, for some reason, largely unfathomable.
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And though temporal proximity is neither necessary nor sufficient to prove causation, a documented medico/physiological event associated with the onset of ME in some 75% of cases (happened to read that figure cited today and used it here out of laziness, but think it is probably inaccurate) is obviously a much less likely cause or trigger than an ill defined concept of trauma applied retrospectively to an event happening decades earlier. (Said in a sarcastic tone of voice.)

Generally it is possible to seek some sort of independent verification for a recent infection, especially if medical assistance was sought. Can the same be said of childhood trauma?
 
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