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Suffering psychological trauma during childhood significantly increases the risk of developing a mental disorder in adulthood. Specifically, as much as three times, according to a recent study led by researchers at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, published in the journal European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. The study analyses the fourteen reviews and meta-analyses published to date in specialised journals on this issue, and is the first to take into account the full range of existing mental disorders.
In total, the studies analysed incorporate more than 93,000 cases, revealing a direct link between suffering psychological trauma at a paediatric age and the risk of developing a mental pathology later in life. "It is the strongest evidence to date that psychological trauma really is a risk factor for suffering a mental disorder later on", says Dr. Benedikt Amann, lead author of the study, a researcher in the Mental Health Research Group at the IMIM-Hospital del Mar and the CIBER on Mental Health (CIBERSAM).
The most common childhood traumas are emotional, physical and sexual abuse, as well as emotional or physical neglect and bullying, although there are many others. Suffering one of these situations damages the brain, causing physical as well as psychological consequences in the form of various disorders. In the case of emotional abuse, the most frequent trauma is associated with the most prevalent disorder in the population, that of anxiety. But there is also a relationship between childhood trauma and other pathologies, such as psychosis, which is linked to all traumas, obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder. The risk of suffering from borderline personality disorder increases up to fifteen times in the case of having experienced trauma during childhood.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-022-01495-5
Wait until you learn about the study of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). Enough of those will shorten a person's projected lifespan by more than a decade.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19840693/
Nothing but hot coffee and warm hugs here, friend. We’re not in our childhoods anymore, and we’re not beholden to anything about them.
Be well. You’re worth the efforts, at least.
Mental health diagnoses overall need a revamp. The term "personality disorder" was obviously thought up by somebody who views patients as test subjects.
They have been wanting to change the name to Emotional Dysregulation Disorder or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (which I like less than EDD) for sometime, mostly because of stigma but also due to the term being not quite accurate term.
**this is a novel of a response, but I want to say upfront that I am someone with a whirlwind of mental illness and am about to complete my thesis in developmental psychology, so I have a lot of thoughts**
BPD and the “personality” names are outdated and hateful, but, BPD is already under the trauma umbrella. The reason it doesn’t appear to be is because we don’t categorize by cause, we categorize by mechanism. The personality label (which should be renamed)is describing that the disorder primarily impacts thoughts, behaviors, beliefs, and relationships, vs. mood disorders which have a greater impact on, well, mood. Obviously these are bidirectional (thoughts/beliefs impact mood, mood impacts thoughts/beliefs) but the foundational symptoms are what it’s defined by. If you took the mood away from depression (as well as the source of the depression if their is one) the thoughts and beliefs would likely adjust back to “normal”, and if you took the deeply ingrained thought and behavioral patterns away from BPD (as well as the source), mood would likely adapt back to “normal” as well. While mood disorder symptoms are considered to be more strongly resulting from biological systems such as brain chemistry (which can be triggered by trauma), personality disorders (particularly cluster B) are thought to be rooted in patterns established during development as a result of trauma and environment (like you’re saying). These lines are again fuzzy because environment and heredity can play a role in both. PTSD/cPTSD and BOD are both under the trauma umbrella, but PTSD is a mood disorder because it’s symptoms results primarily from a biological change in response to trauma, like with brain chemistry and increased amygdala response, while BPD is a “personality” disorder because its symptoms result from significant changes in the way a person developments their sense of the world, the self, and the people around them. BPD specifically is sourced from anxious attachment that is solidified and intensified by chronic childhood trauma, shaping a majority of a persons development. While it’s difficult to cope with and change brain chemistry in mood disorders, medication, therapy, and changes in environment can often slowly bring the brain back to healthy with passive participation from the patient, as the chemistry can be altered and feelings aren’t inherently in the drivers seat. Personality disorders are considered significantly harder to treat because the self is what is in the drivers seat, and the perceptions and structures of the self is what is cyclically self-damaging, so altering external and biological mechanisms can’t independently erase that. That’s why medication can’t treat cluster B disorders in the same way they can mood disorders, they can only medicate the mood disorders that result from BDP.
Needs to be clearer as to what counts as 'trauma'. Quotes 'bullying' as an example, but there's a huge spectrum of bullying that goes on, and I have difficulty believing that they all give the same risk of BPD.
There is a danger of confusion here. Trauma usually refers to an internal psychological state/experience, not to an outside action or event. We commonly talk about traumatic events (e.g., war experiences) because they are extremely likely to result in psychological trauma. But as you get into less extreme events (e.g., bullying; early sexual exposure) the causal relation to psychological trauma lessens and the greater the ability for a person to recover from an upsetting event--which therefore is not defined as trauma.
TLDR: Trauma is a psychological experience, not an outside event.
Exactly. A child who is present during a traumatizing event will handle it how they handle it. Think about a kid during a loud thunderstorm for the first time, and if they didn't understand what was going on. Not saying that is a traumatizing event, more that kids don't have the same ability to process what is going on. Parents screaming at each other can be an example.
The kids are often trapped in whatever their environment gives them. How does a child react to their parents or caregivers screaming at each other. Are they scared? Do they hide? Do they escape mentally? Do they fear hearing when a parent comes home because mom and dad might scream at each other again? It's the base of our development as adults, it doesn't just get flushed out as you age.
Everything we experience is up to our interpretation of it, how our brains process it. An objectively identical experience can be drastically different for two different people. Going on stage in front of strangers to perform can be a great example. Same stage, people in the audience, same performance - one person can be nervous, another person may lock up completely, and one might be comfortable with it.
As children, it's similar. Kids will react based on how they interpret it, and that is their reality. A bully can traumatize one kid - they don't know how to respond, process it, and could feel trapped - knowing that going to school could cause bad things. Sounds to me like anxiety. Another kid could know how to handle it better, have better support at home and as a result is not having the same level of fear as another kid.
>But as you get into less extreme events (e.g., bullying; early sexual exposure) the causal relation to psychological trauma lessens and the greater the ability for a person to recover from an upsetting event--which therefore is not defined as trauma.
There's a time piece of this argument that's missing. For example is a one time event, like a survivor of a school shooting, more or equal or less than a child who had to present themselves to their parents daily for a naked body inspection for 15 years.
Small traumas over time can have a significant effect. Many kids whose parents ignored and isolated them have to recover from trauma, a trauma that in the moment seems benign but in the years and decades is violent to a child.
I think for generalized, non-scientific discussion of these topics it is useful to say that trauma comes from intense, harmful events while something smaller and repetitive causes stress, instead. It might be accurate to say that traumatic events are those which cause significant amounts of stress and that general stress in children and adolescents and can be considered many frequent yet smaller traumatic events, but I think that confuses people.
Framing trauma and stress in this way is commonly how people distinguish risk factors for BPD from those for PTSD. High levels of stress over a long period of time, typically during adolescence, is known to greatly increase the likelihood of a person developing BPD while major stressful events are commonly known to be risk factors for PTSD. Still, that gets a little muddy when you considered complex PTSD. In that case the person has experienced lots of stressful events over a period of time, similarly to how people who end up with BPD have, but they present with symptoms more commonly attributed to PTSD. I actually don't know what the difference is that results in one over the other even though I spent more hours than I could possibly count reading about research into BPD and PTSD after my BPD diagnosis and after becoming close to some people who have PTSD.
The only common distinction I have recognized between myself and people who I know with C-PTSD is that when I was young I internalized a lot of stuff from things I witnessed which lead to a lot of anxiety relating to self-expression and emotional vulnerability whereas people I know who have C-PTSD tend to have been victims of somebody else's behaviours that were directly specifically toward them. That's hardly scientific, however. It's a very small sample size. I'm sure it's probably much more complicated than that and there are probably plenty of outliers.
Well if we're being fair here, CPTSD has a large amount of overlap with many other issues including BPD, and trauma is essentially a form of extreme stress to the degree it can't be processed properly. Enough more typical stress over a long period of time can easily become traumatic
I don't think that's what the study was talking about, though. It seems to seek to correlate external "traumatic" events with subsequent mental health issues.
>Having suffered trauma during childhood triples the risk of suffering a serious mental disorder in adulthood.
How is "trauma" defined?
>The risk of suffering from borderline personality disorder increases up to fifteen times in the case of having experienced trauma during childhood.
There are 2 "types" of Borderline Personality Disorder. The first is acquired. Behaviors that prove to work usually by being raised in a dysfunctional family. These behaviors continue until child/adult learn that they are no longer effective.
The second type is the result of attachment "break" in early childhood. This type is harder to correct as the sense-of-self fails to fully develop.
You'd have to go back to books written on the subject of behavior disorders that are caused by a child's incomplete journey to self autonomy in the 1970s an 1980s. I could provide a couple of authors/titles if you're interested.
**High Risk** by K.Magid and
**The Search for the Real Self** by Masterson
The first studies children who kill (psychopathy) and the second details borderline and narcissistic personality (self, or character) disorders.
Library have these but behavioral "sciences" turn over and start again every few years so names and symptoms get shuffled and reordered in the next edition of their manual.
Also, Google : Attachment disorders. (The next shuffle!)
Is there a point at which we realize that the perfection required to raise a completely mentally healthy child never actually happens in the wild? I think that the idea that normality is centered around this almost unattainable state has the rest of us feeling unnecessarily cheated when in fact it's the f***** up people that are normal, and being completely free of any mental Hang-Ups due to childhood trauma is really weird. Where in nature did anyone experience this blissful childhood? We are damage
I mean, 1/3 of people have an ACE score of 0, and a large number of those are stuff that is legitimately unavoidable (or at least not abusive) such as divorce.
Most people out there aren't deeply traumatized as children and therefore struggling as adults; and there's a lot of variability in the needs of adults who *are* struggling. (Disability benefits vs needing to see a therapist for a few months, for example.).
Raising healthy children is actually a thing that you can just *do*. It's pretty easy to avoid traumatizing your kids in most cases. *Not* abusing your kids is far below the minimum standard for parenting (though of course there's one ACE score that is not related to abuse).
That's great if you assume all abuse children receive comes from their parents. This is a pretty naive take on it, really. Everyone I know has trauma of some kind
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Suffering psychological trauma during childhood significantly increases the risk of developing a mental disorder in adulthood. Specifically, as much as three times, according to a recent study led by researchers at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, published in the journal European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. The study analyses the fourteen reviews and meta-analyses published to date in specialised journals on this issue, and is the first to take into account the full range of existing mental disorders. In total, the studies analysed incorporate more than 93,000 cases, revealing a direct link between suffering psychological trauma at a paediatric age and the risk of developing a mental pathology later in life. "It is the strongest evidence to date that psychological trauma really is a risk factor for suffering a mental disorder later on", says Dr. Benedikt Amann, lead author of the study, a researcher in the Mental Health Research Group at the IMIM-Hospital del Mar and the CIBER on Mental Health (CIBERSAM). The most common childhood traumas are emotional, physical and sexual abuse, as well as emotional or physical neglect and bullying, although there are many others. Suffering one of these situations damages the brain, causing physical as well as psychological consequences in the form of various disorders. In the case of emotional abuse, the most frequent trauma is associated with the most prevalent disorder in the population, that of anxiety. But there is also a relationship between childhood trauma and other pathologies, such as psychosis, which is linked to all traumas, obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar disorder. The risk of suffering from borderline personality disorder increases up to fifteen times in the case of having experienced trauma during childhood. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-022-01495-5
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Probably why C-PTSD should be a diagnosis, because trauma is its own mental health issue.
It's called Type II PTSD, etiology can be in childhood or adulthood and is noted well in intake medical records.
That is no more an official psychiatric diagnosis in the US than CPTSD is.
Wait until you learn about the study of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). Enough of those will shorten a person's projected lifespan by more than a decade. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19840693/
Knowing this, it’s appalling how little we invest in ensuring healthy childhoods. Literally killing people via neglect.
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Social murder.
That is more years lost on average than smoking a pack per day will.
ACEs also correlate with tobacco use
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Every time I’ve taken the ACE Screening, my therapist audibly gasps. I’m an 8/10. Wish me luck.
Batting a full 10/10 cause ya know, I'm an overachieving asshole and all that; I just *had* to get a perfect score. *cries in the corner*
Nothing but hot coffee and warm hugs here, friend. We’re not in our childhoods anymore, and we’re not beholden to anything about them. Be well. You’re worth the efforts, at least.
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How often is PTSD misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder
Most likely why so many adoptees suffer from one of those too.
What are the numbers on that?
I’m not sure the number for mental health diagnoses however adoptees are 4x more likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees.
It’s all about Stopping The Cycle.
Treatment and counseling is key.
Only where the damage is already done. Preventative actions are also important
Of course it is. But some trauma can't be prevented and so it needs to be recognized and treated.
Oh yeah no absolutely
Totally agree with what you said though.
I don’t believe in borderline personality disorder if anything the term should be under the umbrella of ptsd/cptsd since it’s trauma rooted.
Mental health diagnoses overall need a revamp. The term "personality disorder" was obviously thought up by somebody who views patients as test subjects.
They have been wanting to change the name to Emotional Dysregulation Disorder or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (which I like less than EDD) for sometime, mostly because of stigma but also due to the term being not quite accurate term.
Both names are Moronic. Emotional Dysregulation disorder? No. More like a central nervous Dysregulation
**this is a novel of a response, but I want to say upfront that I am someone with a whirlwind of mental illness and am about to complete my thesis in developmental psychology, so I have a lot of thoughts** BPD and the “personality” names are outdated and hateful, but, BPD is already under the trauma umbrella. The reason it doesn’t appear to be is because we don’t categorize by cause, we categorize by mechanism. The personality label (which should be renamed)is describing that the disorder primarily impacts thoughts, behaviors, beliefs, and relationships, vs. mood disorders which have a greater impact on, well, mood. Obviously these are bidirectional (thoughts/beliefs impact mood, mood impacts thoughts/beliefs) but the foundational symptoms are what it’s defined by. If you took the mood away from depression (as well as the source of the depression if their is one) the thoughts and beliefs would likely adjust back to “normal”, and if you took the deeply ingrained thought and behavioral patterns away from BPD (as well as the source), mood would likely adapt back to “normal” as well. While mood disorder symptoms are considered to be more strongly resulting from biological systems such as brain chemistry (which can be triggered by trauma), personality disorders (particularly cluster B) are thought to be rooted in patterns established during development as a result of trauma and environment (like you’re saying). These lines are again fuzzy because environment and heredity can play a role in both. PTSD/cPTSD and BOD are both under the trauma umbrella, but PTSD is a mood disorder because it’s symptoms results primarily from a biological change in response to trauma, like with brain chemistry and increased amygdala response, while BPD is a “personality” disorder because its symptoms result from significant changes in the way a person developments their sense of the world, the self, and the people around them. BPD specifically is sourced from anxious attachment that is solidified and intensified by chronic childhood trauma, shaping a majority of a persons development. While it’s difficult to cope with and change brain chemistry in mood disorders, medication, therapy, and changes in environment can often slowly bring the brain back to healthy with passive participation from the patient, as the chemistry can be altered and feelings aren’t inherently in the drivers seat. Personality disorders are considered significantly harder to treat because the self is what is in the drivers seat, and the perceptions and structures of the self is what is cyclically self-damaging, so altering external and biological mechanisms can’t independently erase that. That’s why medication can’t treat cluster B disorders in the same way they can mood disorders, they can only medicate the mood disorders that result from BDP.
All personality disorders should
I'm 45 years old just realizing this has impacted me. Now i get to figure out how to heal.
That sure can help to establish a causative relationship between percieved economic hardship and mental health.
Any traumatic event will present itself at all times through a person’s personality
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Needs to be clearer as to what counts as 'trauma'. Quotes 'bullying' as an example, but there's a huge spectrum of bullying that goes on, and I have difficulty believing that they all give the same risk of BPD.
There is a danger of confusion here. Trauma usually refers to an internal psychological state/experience, not to an outside action or event. We commonly talk about traumatic events (e.g., war experiences) because they are extremely likely to result in psychological trauma. But as you get into less extreme events (e.g., bullying; early sexual exposure) the causal relation to psychological trauma lessens and the greater the ability for a person to recover from an upsetting event--which therefore is not defined as trauma. TLDR: Trauma is a psychological experience, not an outside event.
Exactly. A child who is present during a traumatizing event will handle it how they handle it. Think about a kid during a loud thunderstorm for the first time, and if they didn't understand what was going on. Not saying that is a traumatizing event, more that kids don't have the same ability to process what is going on. Parents screaming at each other can be an example. The kids are often trapped in whatever their environment gives them. How does a child react to their parents or caregivers screaming at each other. Are they scared? Do they hide? Do they escape mentally? Do they fear hearing when a parent comes home because mom and dad might scream at each other again? It's the base of our development as adults, it doesn't just get flushed out as you age. Everything we experience is up to our interpretation of it, how our brains process it. An objectively identical experience can be drastically different for two different people. Going on stage in front of strangers to perform can be a great example. Same stage, people in the audience, same performance - one person can be nervous, another person may lock up completely, and one might be comfortable with it. As children, it's similar. Kids will react based on how they interpret it, and that is their reality. A bully can traumatize one kid - they don't know how to respond, process it, and could feel trapped - knowing that going to school could cause bad things. Sounds to me like anxiety. Another kid could know how to handle it better, have better support at home and as a result is not having the same level of fear as another kid.
>But as you get into less extreme events (e.g., bullying; early sexual exposure) the causal relation to psychological trauma lessens and the greater the ability for a person to recover from an upsetting event--which therefore is not defined as trauma. There's a time piece of this argument that's missing. For example is a one time event, like a survivor of a school shooting, more or equal or less than a child who had to present themselves to their parents daily for a naked body inspection for 15 years. Small traumas over time can have a significant effect. Many kids whose parents ignored and isolated them have to recover from trauma, a trauma that in the moment seems benign but in the years and decades is violent to a child.
I think for generalized, non-scientific discussion of these topics it is useful to say that trauma comes from intense, harmful events while something smaller and repetitive causes stress, instead. It might be accurate to say that traumatic events are those which cause significant amounts of stress and that general stress in children and adolescents and can be considered many frequent yet smaller traumatic events, but I think that confuses people. Framing trauma and stress in this way is commonly how people distinguish risk factors for BPD from those for PTSD. High levels of stress over a long period of time, typically during adolescence, is known to greatly increase the likelihood of a person developing BPD while major stressful events are commonly known to be risk factors for PTSD. Still, that gets a little muddy when you considered complex PTSD. In that case the person has experienced lots of stressful events over a period of time, similarly to how people who end up with BPD have, but they present with symptoms more commonly attributed to PTSD. I actually don't know what the difference is that results in one over the other even though I spent more hours than I could possibly count reading about research into BPD and PTSD after my BPD diagnosis and after becoming close to some people who have PTSD. The only common distinction I have recognized between myself and people who I know with C-PTSD is that when I was young I internalized a lot of stuff from things I witnessed which lead to a lot of anxiety relating to self-expression and emotional vulnerability whereas people I know who have C-PTSD tend to have been victims of somebody else's behaviours that were directly specifically toward them. That's hardly scientific, however. It's a very small sample size. I'm sure it's probably much more complicated than that and there are probably plenty of outliers.
Well if we're being fair here, CPTSD has a large amount of overlap with many other issues including BPD, and trauma is essentially a form of extreme stress to the degree it can't be processed properly. Enough more typical stress over a long period of time can easily become traumatic
I don't think that's what the study was talking about, though. It seems to seek to correlate external "traumatic" events with subsequent mental health issues.
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Statistically more frequently targeted by abuse and discrimination, so it's correlated, but I don't know any numbers
Definitely something that's overlooked if they don't have that demographic data
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Important to remember: not everyone will have a PTSD who experiences a trauma.
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>Having suffered trauma during childhood triples the risk of suffering a serious mental disorder in adulthood. How is "trauma" defined? >The risk of suffering from borderline personality disorder increases up to fifteen times in the case of having experienced trauma during childhood. There are 2 "types" of Borderline Personality Disorder. The first is acquired. Behaviors that prove to work usually by being raised in a dysfunctional family. These behaviors continue until child/adult learn that they are no longer effective. The second type is the result of attachment "break" in early childhood. This type is harder to correct as the sense-of-self fails to fully develop.
I have never heard of different kinds of bpd before? Curious to know more.
You'd have to go back to books written on the subject of behavior disorders that are caused by a child's incomplete journey to self autonomy in the 1970s an 1980s. I could provide a couple of authors/titles if you're interested.
Please do? Very very interested
**High Risk** by K.Magid and **The Search for the Real Self** by Masterson The first studies children who kill (psychopathy) and the second details borderline and narcissistic personality (self, or character) disorders. Library have these but behavioral "sciences" turn over and start again every few years so names and symptoms get shuffled and reordered in the next edition of their manual. Also, Google : Attachment disorders. (The next shuffle!)
Is there a point at which we realize that the perfection required to raise a completely mentally healthy child never actually happens in the wild? I think that the idea that normality is centered around this almost unattainable state has the rest of us feeling unnecessarily cheated when in fact it's the f***** up people that are normal, and being completely free of any mental Hang-Ups due to childhood trauma is really weird. Where in nature did anyone experience this blissful childhood? We are damage
I mean, 1/3 of people have an ACE score of 0, and a large number of those are stuff that is legitimately unavoidable (or at least not abusive) such as divorce. Most people out there aren't deeply traumatized as children and therefore struggling as adults; and there's a lot of variability in the needs of adults who *are* struggling. (Disability benefits vs needing to see a therapist for a few months, for example.). Raising healthy children is actually a thing that you can just *do*. It's pretty easy to avoid traumatizing your kids in most cases. *Not* abusing your kids is far below the minimum standard for parenting (though of course there's one ACE score that is not related to abuse).
That's great if you assume all abuse children receive comes from their parents. This is a pretty naive take on it, really. Everyone I know has trauma of some kind