The effects of untreated PTSD in inner-city communities
September 8, 2014 3:10 PM Subscribe
Over the past 20 years, medical researchers have found new ways to quantify the effects of the relentless violence on America’s inner cities, [and are] only now beginning to trace the effects of untreated PTSD on neighborhoods that are already struggling with unemployment, poverty and the devastating impact of the war on drugs. [...] Despite the growing evidence of PTSD in civilians, little is being done to address the problem. Hospital trauma centers often provide adequate care for physical wounds, but do almost nothing to help patients cope with the mental and emotional aftermath of trauma.
Thank you for posting this. Empirically and theoretically fascinating, morally grave, and unquestionably deserving of action.
posted by clockzero at 4:06 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by clockzero at 4:06 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
What is really frustrating to me is the fact that our society has to spend umpteen squillion federal dollars running surveys and studies to establish that yes, people are traumatized when they see extreme violence even if they are black and poor and live in cities. Those scarce federal dollars could either be rerouted to medical research or spent on programs for actual victims.
It just kills me that the way things seem to work is that if you're middle class or upper middle class, you can very often make a career getting paid to study the bad things that happen to poor people, but the poor people can't get a fucking dollar to make their lives better. It's just as much a hand-out to give someone a $250,000/year R01 to study the psychological effects of violence as it is to give, oh, the people living with the violence some healthcare and decent food and money for rent.
posted by Frowner at 4:12 PM on September 8, 2014 [33 favorites]
It just kills me that the way things seem to work is that if you're middle class or upper middle class, you can very often make a career getting paid to study the bad things that happen to poor people, but the poor people can't get a fucking dollar to make their lives better. It's just as much a hand-out to give someone a $250,000/year R01 to study the psychological effects of violence as it is to give, oh, the people living with the violence some healthcare and decent food and money for rent.
posted by Frowner at 4:12 PM on September 8, 2014 [33 favorites]
Wow, for some reason I'd never thought of it like this. Thanks OP, I think I found my research topic for my class in health & the built environment.
posted by Echobelly at 4:20 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by Echobelly at 4:20 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]
What is really frustrating to me is the fact that our society has to spend umpteen squillion federal dollars running surveys and studies to establish that yes, people are traumatized when they see extreme violence even if they are black and poor and live in cities. Those scarce federal dollars could either be rerouted to medical research or spent on programs for actual victims.
Oh god yes, this drives me insane, and I regret to inform you that it's not just federal dollars going into this, it's an increasingly large amount of private philanthropy dollars as well, and it makes me gnash my teeth and rend my garments when decisions are made to cut funding to (for example) an afterschool program (that the fed/state already stopped funding themselves) in order to instead fund a study about whether or not afterschool programs are valuable. (exaggerated fake example but close enough for the gnashing and rending)
posted by poffin boffin at 4:45 PM on September 8, 2014 [4 favorites]
Oh god yes, this drives me insane, and I regret to inform you that it's not just federal dollars going into this, it's an increasingly large amount of private philanthropy dollars as well, and it makes me gnash my teeth and rend my garments when decisions are made to cut funding to (for example) an afterschool program (that the fed/state already stopped funding themselves) in order to instead fund a study about whether or not afterschool programs are valuable. (exaggerated fake example but close enough for the gnashing and rending)
posted by poffin boffin at 4:45 PM on September 8, 2014 [4 favorites]
Frowner >
What is really frustrating to me is the fact that our society has to spend umpteen squillion federal dollars running surveys and studies to establish that yes, people are traumatized when they see extreme violence even if they are black and poor and live in cities. Those scarce federal dollars could either be rerouted to medical research or spent on programs for actual victims.
I sympathize completely with what you say about priorities, in a broad sense, but make no mistake: the federal government actually spends very, very, very little on things like this, outside of massive efforts like the census which is about as technocratic as it gets. Not squillions. Not even billions.
It just kills me that the way things seem to work is that if you're middle class or upper middle class, you can very often make a career getting paid to study the bad things that happen to poor people, but the poor people can't get a fucking dollar to make their lives better. It's just as much a hand-out to give someone a $250,000/year R01 to study the psychological effects of violence as it is to give, oh, the people living with the violence some healthcare and decent food and money for rent.
I realize that you mean it's particularly galling that you can get paid to study poverty, but not to, like, do anything about it, and I understand (but disagree with) the claim that getting paid to study it doesn't directly help improve the lives of the impoverished. Consider, though, that very, very few people ever get paid to do that, that those people are basically the only ones not involved in direct action who dedicate their careers to asking the right questions, and also that the amount they get paid is orders of magnitude less than a rounding error in the context of our national budget. In other words, not only are social scientists on the right side (for the most part, and categorically excluding economists) of distributive justice, but the amount of resources that actually flow to studying things like poverty would perhaps improve the lives of a few hundred actual poor people if those monies were redirected.
poffin boffin >
Oh god yes, this drives me insane, and I regret to inform you that it's not just federal dollars going into this, it's an increasingly large amount of private philanthropy dollars as well, and it makes me gnash my teeth and rend my garments when decisions are made to cut funding to (for example) an afterschool program (that the fed/state already stopped funding themselves) in order to instead fund a study about whether or not afterschool programs are valuable. (exaggerated fake example but close enough for the gnashing and rending)
I understand your frustration, but in an impartial sense, why would it be good to spend lots of money on things without knowing whether or not they help people, or how they do so? Isn't it better to study complex social phenomena, figure out what factors are causes and which are effects, what works and what doesn't; and then, armed with that knowledge and with moral insight, decide how to spend the people's money in a way that helps the people? What should inform the design of social policy, if not knowledge about the efficacy of interventions?
posted by clockzero at 4:53 PM on September 8, 2014 [15 favorites]
What is really frustrating to me is the fact that our society has to spend umpteen squillion federal dollars running surveys and studies to establish that yes, people are traumatized when they see extreme violence even if they are black and poor and live in cities. Those scarce federal dollars could either be rerouted to medical research or spent on programs for actual victims.
I sympathize completely with what you say about priorities, in a broad sense, but make no mistake: the federal government actually spends very, very, very little on things like this, outside of massive efforts like the census which is about as technocratic as it gets. Not squillions. Not even billions.
It just kills me that the way things seem to work is that if you're middle class or upper middle class, you can very often make a career getting paid to study the bad things that happen to poor people, but the poor people can't get a fucking dollar to make their lives better. It's just as much a hand-out to give someone a $250,000/year R01 to study the psychological effects of violence as it is to give, oh, the people living with the violence some healthcare and decent food and money for rent.
I realize that you mean it's particularly galling that you can get paid to study poverty, but not to, like, do anything about it, and I understand (but disagree with) the claim that getting paid to study it doesn't directly help improve the lives of the impoverished. Consider, though, that very, very few people ever get paid to do that, that those people are basically the only ones not involved in direct action who dedicate their careers to asking the right questions, and also that the amount they get paid is orders of magnitude less than a rounding error in the context of our national budget. In other words, not only are social scientists on the right side (for the most part, and categorically excluding economists) of distributive justice, but the amount of resources that actually flow to studying things like poverty would perhaps improve the lives of a few hundred actual poor people if those monies were redirected.
poffin boffin >
Oh god yes, this drives me insane, and I regret to inform you that it's not just federal dollars going into this, it's an increasingly large amount of private philanthropy dollars as well, and it makes me gnash my teeth and rend my garments when decisions are made to cut funding to (for example) an afterschool program (that the fed/state already stopped funding themselves) in order to instead fund a study about whether or not afterschool programs are valuable. (exaggerated fake example but close enough for the gnashing and rending)
I understand your frustration, but in an impartial sense, why would it be good to spend lots of money on things without knowing whether or not they help people, or how they do so? Isn't it better to study complex social phenomena, figure out what factors are causes and which are effects, what works and what doesn't; and then, armed with that knowledge and with moral insight, decide how to spend the people's money in a way that helps the people? What should inform the design of social policy, if not knowledge about the efficacy of interventions?
posted by clockzero at 4:53 PM on September 8, 2014 [15 favorites]
I realize that you mean it's particularly galling that you can get paid to study poverty, but not to, like, do anything about it, and I understand (but disagree with) the claim that getting paid to study it doesn't directly help improve the lives of the impoverished. Consider, though, that very, very few people ever get paid to do that, that those people are basically the only ones not involved in direct action who dedicate their careers to asking the right questions, and also that the amount they get paid is orders of magnitude less than a rounding error in the context of our national budget
See, I actually know people who get paid to study poverty. I know people who get paid to administer charity funds. I know people who've made very nice upper middle class careers studying and administering poverty stuff - the kinds of careers where you have, like, a really nice house in a really nice neighborhood, and a nice new car and a good retirement account. These aren't bad people, at all, but every time I think about the ~$120,000/year that it costs to pay them and their benefits, I think about how much good that $120,000 could do in my neighborhood if it went to rent, repairs, childcare...Now, there'd be administrative costs on that, but you could hire and train, for instance, a working class person to administer that money - so you'd get a neighborhood job and neighborhood disbursement of funds.
I don't particularly care that it's not a big chunk of the national budget. (And I know about that pretty well too, because I see how NIH is doing and the impact that's having on basic sciences.) What bothers me is that poverty gets turned into an employment program - not for the poor, but for the sensitive among the well off.
And it bothers me that the news we're getting is "a study shows that poor people in shitty neighborhoods are traumatized by seeing corpses". That study is necessary to prove that poor people aren't some kind of lower animal. In my solidly middle class neighborhood growing up, we got trauma counselors when there was one incident of visible violence in which no one died or was seriously injured - that was just policy. And that's because nicely raised white little boys and girls are assumed to be traumatized by even trivial violence, but we need a study so that someone somewhere can write another grant so that perhaps someday we can get some small trial programs for PTSD treatment for a small number of poor people, maybe, and even those poor people will be the most connected, astute and functional because it will be a job and a half even to find out about the resources.
And when we have those trial programs, there will be a handful of [mostly white] therapists, probably kind and decent people, who will spend part of their career arc doing therapy before rising and becoming nonprofit directors at bigger salaries. There will be a couple of senior [almost certainly white] administrators drawing bigger salaries, and there will be [mostly white] grant writers and [mostly white] bookkeepers and [mostly white] foundation staff and [almost exclusively white, and rich too] foundation boards, and then one year the funding will get yanked because the foundation only wants to fund "seed" projects to avoid dependency, and then everyone's out on the street again.
It's the whole arc of the money and power that guarantees that very little will change. And, as the man said, it's not in a fellow's interest to notice something if his employment depends on not noticing it...which is why we'll have studies out the ass.
In this town, if you're poor and you want to sit down with a caseworker to discuss your options - oh, that's easy. They'll give you the short list of difficult to access free medical care, and the short list of food pantries, and then you'll find out that if you have a serious medical condition or are actually in the process of becoming homeless, you're screwed because there isn't any money. There's lots of caseworkers. There's lots of knowledge. There's almost no halfway houses, subsidized housing, affordable medical care, emergency funding...and that's because of the systematic professionalization and privatization of the safety net, which has resulted in its looting. It's been looted accidentally by social workers and sociology PhDs, true, but it's still looted.
posted by Frowner at 5:23 PM on September 8, 2014 [14 favorites]
I really can't go into specifics because it's my job and I don't particularly want it getting back to me, but in the actual example I exaggerated, the fact is that a group with certain needs had the funding for those needs taken away and put towards a study to see if those needs were really the most important needs to be met, with the immediate effect of those needs no longer being met, and a long term effect of other people (very, very erroneously) assuming that those needs were not important enough to be met, simply because the fed/state decided not to care about it and the primary private donor decided that the lack of public funding meant that the program had no intrinsic value, which was an appallingly incorrect reading of the situation and one that I am still deeply furious over.
In the perfect world funders would not have to pick and choose between meeting immediate needs and studying in the long term how to prevent those needs from happening in the first place, obviously.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:26 PM on September 8, 2014 [8 favorites]
In the perfect world funders would not have to pick and choose between meeting immediate needs and studying in the long term how to prevent those needs from happening in the first place, obviously.
posted by poffin boffin at 5:26 PM on September 8, 2014 [8 favorites]
“School districts are trying to educate kids whose brains are not working the way they should be working because of trauma,”
At a middle school where I taught in Southeast DC we watched like an hour long video talking about how kids are traumatized and how we need to help and support them, then we had a discussion about it. The counselor (who was fantastic) kept doing some stuff she was doing anyway, lunchtime groups and stuff, but that was about it. It was just another way to put pressure on teachers in underserved communities and make us feel guilty for being unable to achieve the virtually impossible. I just wanted to scream "IF THIS IS SO IMPORTANT (and obviously I agree it is) ASSIGN RESOURCES TO IT! I HAVE TWENTY SEVEN KIDS IN MY CLASSES AND MANY OF THEM ARE VERY TROUBLED, I CARE VERY MUCH BUT IF I START ACTING LIKE A TRAUMA COUNSELOR I'LL FAIL MY IMPACT OBSERVATIONS AND GET FIRED. ALSO I AM NOT TRAINED FOR THAT."
This is really, really important and working with schools would be a great way to help, but if that means giving more resources instead of firing counselors/social workers and blaming teachers, unfortunately it just isn't likely to be addressed properly.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:32 PM on September 8, 2014 [20 favorites]
At a middle school where I taught in Southeast DC we watched like an hour long video talking about how kids are traumatized and how we need to help and support them, then we had a discussion about it. The counselor (who was fantastic) kept doing some stuff she was doing anyway, lunchtime groups and stuff, but that was about it. It was just another way to put pressure on teachers in underserved communities and make us feel guilty for being unable to achieve the virtually impossible. I just wanted to scream "IF THIS IS SO IMPORTANT (and obviously I agree it is) ASSIGN RESOURCES TO IT! I HAVE TWENTY SEVEN KIDS IN MY CLASSES AND MANY OF THEM ARE VERY TROUBLED, I CARE VERY MUCH BUT IF I START ACTING LIKE A TRAUMA COUNSELOR I'LL FAIL MY IMPACT OBSERVATIONS AND GET FIRED. ALSO I AM NOT TRAINED FOR THAT."
This is really, really important and working with schools would be a great way to help, but if that means giving more resources instead of firing counselors/social workers and blaming teachers, unfortunately it just isn't likely to be addressed properly.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:32 PM on September 8, 2014 [20 favorites]
And when we have those trial programs, there will be a handful of [mostly white] therapists, probably kind and decent people, who will spend part of their career arc doing therapy before rising and becoming nonprofit directors at bigger salaries.
This is very, very significant. As mentioned in the above comment, those therapists are mostly kind and very decent people. But the glaring differences in life experience and cultural background can sometimes (or oftentimes) make it difficult for the population in need to forge a meaningful, fully trusting connection with those therapists, and that makes their work less effective. This is why we need more minority therapists/social workers/psychiatrists and more support for youth in these communities who might be able to somehow grow up and get out, obtain some training in healthcare or counseling, and then return to and support the communities in which they grew up.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 5:41 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
This is very, very significant. As mentioned in the above comment, those therapists are mostly kind and very decent people. But the glaring differences in life experience and cultural background can sometimes (or oftentimes) make it difficult for the population in need to forge a meaningful, fully trusting connection with those therapists, and that makes their work less effective. This is why we need more minority therapists/social workers/psychiatrists and more support for youth in these communities who might be able to somehow grow up and get out, obtain some training in healthcare or counseling, and then return to and support the communities in which they grew up.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 5:41 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
But the glaring differences in life experience and cultural background can sometimes (or oftentimes) make it difficult for the population in need to forge a meaningful, fully trusting connection with those therapists, and that makes their work less effective. This is why we need more minority therapists/social workers/psychiatrists and more support for youth in these communities who might be able to somehow grow up and get out, obtain some training in healthcare or counseling, and then return to and support the communities in which they grew up.
Oh yes yes yes yes yes! This is such a good and excellent point! It's definitely easy to have a "white people, here to save the day!" thing going on in these circumstances and it is really, really tough (I am white and there has been a lot of often justified distrust and I struggled with my role as a teacher in poor schools full of black kids). Supporting people with similar experiences so that they are in a position to make changes (and I really do mean "support with money and training and respect" and not "tell them about bootstraps") is such a good big huge deal.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:50 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
Oh yes yes yes yes yes! This is such a good and excellent point! It's definitely easy to have a "white people, here to save the day!" thing going on in these circumstances and it is really, really tough (I am white and there has been a lot of often justified distrust and I struggled with my role as a teacher in poor schools full of black kids). Supporting people with similar experiences so that they are in a position to make changes (and I really do mean "support with money and training and respect" and not "tell them about bootstraps") is such a good big huge deal.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:50 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
The other thing to realize is that providing training to people with higher levels of trauma especially across developmental periods, and higher levels of adversity and parental absence/etc... means you need to change the way you design the education system to meet their studying and learning needs. So it's not just telling them they need to care more and try harder (as you mentioned Mrs. Pterodactyl) but also about providing accommodations that reflect and understanding of the cognitive damage, executive dysfunction, spaciness and other symptoms associated with the after effects of trauma and respecting the human dignity of the right to grieve and to think that SOME FUCKING SHIT is so much fucking more important that the stupid deadlines and bullshit that makes sense as a way of designing a school for efficiency and students with light hearts and minds that aren't weighed with the burden of knowledge of unbearable suffering at such a young age.
It is not humane to assume that we have to force grieving, pained people to stuff it and turn into bright little information gobblers. That is not how everyone has to be, nor does everyone have to be medicated or forced into therapy to be what white middle class america wants every one to be normalized at.
posted by xarnop at 6:14 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
It is not humane to assume that we have to force grieving, pained people to stuff it and turn into bright little information gobblers. That is not how everyone has to be, nor does everyone have to be medicated or forced into therapy to be what white middle class america wants every one to be normalized at.
posted by xarnop at 6:14 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
So just this afternoon I needed to kill a couple hours near Boston city hospital, found a coffee shop that had parking!? in the city! Ah, I see that it's close to Dudley square, on the 'wrong' side of mass ave. But free parking woo, after reading for a bit I realized I'd never been through that area, now this is oh a 10 minute walk from the upscale south end and I'd probably not get around to ever coming by if I didn't do a walk around now.
Oh my. Just the broken people (of color of course) I walked past. A good lot of regular folks going home and all and a few colorful characters that I would not be surprised to see a bit all that 15 blocks into the 'good' areas. But just all along a short walk there were folks that just were not right. There were certainly sub-currents I'd never be aware of and elements of non-white culture that I have no right judging, but it's not that at all, there were just many people that were just not where everyone should be. There a folks not running at 100%, I'm lucky to be at 80%. I'm pretty oblivious actually to the gritty street stuff but it was all along, in the open, not "in your face" but just part of that world. Nothing special, just there.
posted by sammyo at 6:32 PM on September 8, 2014
Oh my. Just the broken people (of color of course) I walked past. A good lot of regular folks going home and all and a few colorful characters that I would not be surprised to see a bit all that 15 blocks into the 'good' areas. But just all along a short walk there were folks that just were not right. There were certainly sub-currents I'd never be aware of and elements of non-white culture that I have no right judging, but it's not that at all, there were just many people that were just not where everyone should be. There a folks not running at 100%, I'm lucky to be at 80%. I'm pretty oblivious actually to the gritty street stuff but it was all along, in the open, not "in your face" but just part of that world. Nothing special, just there.
posted by sammyo at 6:32 PM on September 8, 2014
I work with someone who grew up in a notoriously dangerous city neighborhood and he honestly still has the worst case of PTSD I've ever encountered. Everything is a crisis, everything, and every casual conversation turns within five minutes to some horrific grisly tale. And this guy is in his 40s. Considering it's a miracle he is alive at all, he has done very well.
I also work with someone else who grew up in an actual war zone, and he seems fine, but his family was solidly middle-class and fully functioning, and he seems to have fully grasped that the war was a temporary thing.
For my other colleague, it's like the enemy is all around him and he will never escape, and must be eternally vigilant.
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:45 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]
I also work with someone else who grew up in an actual war zone, and he seems fine, but his family was solidly middle-class and fully functioning, and he seems to have fully grasped that the war was a temporary thing.
For my other colleague, it's like the enemy is all around him and he will never escape, and must be eternally vigilant.
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:45 PM on September 8, 2014 [2 favorites]
PTSD, like pretty much all mental-health disorders, is usually a result of both genetics and environment, and someone's baseline resilience (which is, again, generally both genetic and learned), as well as their developmental stage at the time of the trauma(s), will very much influence how traumatic any given event or situation may be. Which can complicate things, because it's not just "Event X automatically causes Reaction Y."
But that can also reinforce the racism/classicism Frowner mentioned, where there's some ignorant assumption that certain people just "get used" to violence.
posted by jaguar at 6:53 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
But that can also reinforce the racism/classicism Frowner mentioned, where there's some ignorant assumption that certain people just "get used" to violence.
posted by jaguar at 6:53 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
Frowner >
See, I actually know people who get paid to study poverty.
I actually do, too. I'm a sociology graduate student. My partner is writing her dissertation about welfare policy, and I personally know several professors who teach and have written influential books on the subject.
I know people who get paid to administer charity funds.
That's not at all the same group that actually studies things like poverty. As in, completely different people, different context, different everything.
I know people who've made very nice upper middle class careers studying and administering poverty stuff - the kinds of careers where you have, like, a really nice house in a really nice neighborhood, and a nice new car and a good retirement account.
I am confused about why you'd lump academics in with people who do administration, especially for private charities. We have totally different funding sources, goals, and positions on virtually everything that matters. The two groups are simply not the same, at all. Apples and oranges.
These aren't bad people, at all, but every time I think about the ~$120,000/year that it costs to pay them and their benefits, I think about how much good that $120,000 could do in my neighborhood if it went to rent, repairs, childcare...
I totally agree that upper-middle-class salaries could benefit people and communities that are, broadly speaking, in a lower SE bracket.
Now, there'd be administrative costs on that, but you could hire and train, for instance, a working class person to administer that money - so you'd get a neighborhood job and neighborhood disbursement of funds.
Or those charities would just pay that person less. Or the person would move to a middle-class neighborhood anyway, which is what a lot of working-class people do. And by the way, that's something you can discover by doing or reading social research.
I don't particularly care that it's not a big chunk of the national budget. (And I know about that pretty well too, because I see how NIH is doing and the impact that's having on basic sciences.) What bothers me is that poverty gets turned into an employment program - not for the poor, but for the sensitive among the well off.
Frowner, I generally have a lot of respect for your thoughts and opinions, but I think you're not seeing who are your allies and who are your enemies right now. The idea that making a career out of studying poverty should be characterized as an "employment program...for the sensitive among the well-off" is wrong (and I mean, empirically wrong) on so many levels. Many of the most prominent scholars of poverty in America do not come from "well off" families, and they often study it because they believe they can contribute to positive social change by doing good social science. Many of the ones I know are also involved in community organizing, (not) incidentally.
More importantly, we are the ones who provide the only direct experience that most people will ever have with empirically-informed alternative viewpoints about what is natural and what is right when it comes to the distribution of resources in society. Most students (of all backgrounds) come into our classrooms thinking that the poor are poor because they're lazy, and that Black people should really just try harder and not take advantage of welfare so much. Every day, graduate students, adjuncts and professors work against those spurious and damaging perceptions by educating people about social reality. I think that itself is tremendously valuable, and I am just baffled that anyone could so casually claim that the extremely hard and almost universally unappreciated work of educating citizens and doing original social research into poverty is some easy-peasy "jobs program" for "sensitive" people who are, apparently, "well-off." I'll have to inform my friends and colleagues that their working-class backgrounds, which spurred them into the study of poverty to begin with, are actually fake, and by the way thank you so damn much for socially promoting me as well.
And it bothers me that the news we're getting is "a study shows that poor people in shitty neighborhoods are traumatized by seeing corpses". That study is necessary to prove that poor people aren't some kind of lower animal.
I think that's a really tendentious way to interpret that work. The point there (to my mind, anyway) isn't that poor people have reactions similar to those of not-poor people in response to trauma, but that a certain kind of life event that is common in impoverished urban environments has an effect which, it is now empirically demonstrated, was before largely regarded as only affecting people like soldiers or maybe some police or emergency first-responders. Whether you and I like it or not, the world outside of social justice advocacy and academia cares more about what can be impartially demonstrated than about what can be passionately claimed, and we can use both impartial demonstrations of what's happening in the world along with that passionate advocacy to effect real systemic change. I mean, if you're not too proud and too pure for partnership with us, of course.
In my solidly middle class neighborhood growing up, we got trauma counselors when there was one incident of visible violence in which no one died or was seriously injured - that was just policy.
Well, how nice for you. I sure as hell didn't. But then I'm not from your class, I guess.
And that's because nicely raised white little boys and girls are assumed to be traumatized by even trivial violence, but we need a study so that someone somewhere can write another grant so that perhaps someday we can get some small trial programs for PTSD treatment for a small number of poor people, maybe, and even those poor people will be the most connected, astute and functional because it will be a job and a half even to find out about the resources.
Yeah, and my colleagues are the type of people who do research which - again - empirically demonstrates that, e.g., Black kids tend to have their age over-estimated in comparison to White kids when accused of the same crime, or that the former group is also regarded as physically stronger and emotionally less sophisticated than the latter.
And when we have those trial programs, there will be a handful of [mostly white] therapists, probably kind and decent people, who will spend part of their career arc doing therapy before rising and becoming nonprofit directors at bigger salaries. There will be a couple of senior [almost certainly white] administrators drawing bigger salaries, and there will be [mostly white] grant writers and [mostly white] bookkeepers and [mostly white] foundation staff and [almost exclusively white, and rich too] foundation boards, and then one year the funding will get yanked because the foundation only wants to fund "seed" projects to avoid dependency, and then everyone's out on the street again. It's the whole arc of the money and power that guarantees that very little will change. And, as the man said, it's not in a fellow's interest to notice something if his employment depends on not noticing it...which is why we'll have studies out the ass.
Again, the fact that you're conflating nonprofit work with academic research and teaching about poverty seems strange to me. I am not any more of a fan of that dysfunctional process you describe than you are, and neither are academics, as a group.
In this town, if you're poor and you want to sit down with a caseworker to discuss your options - oh, that's easy. They'll give you the short list of difficult to access free medical care, and the short list of food pantries, and then you'll find out that if you have a serious medical condition or are actually in the process of becoming homeless, you're screwed because there isn't any money.
Those are all structural problems! Why do you think academics have anything to do with perpetuating that? They're the ones who are constantly talking about how problematic they are and how they need to change!
There's lots of caseworkers. There's lots of knowledge. There's almost no halfway houses, subsidized housing, affordable medical care, emergency funding...and that's because of the systematic professionalization and privatization of the safety net, which has resulted in its looting. It's been looted accidentally by social workers and sociology PhDs, true, but it's still looted.
I think it's good that the safety net is professionalized. Do you want people without any training in psychology doing counseling? Should non-trained individuals be administering medical care? I sure as hell don't think so, and I continue to be utterly baffled by the things you're saying right now. What's more, the privatization of the safety net has nothing to do with the fact that people administering health care, mental health care, or other services to poor people are professionals. What factual events or empirical trends are you basing this all on?
The idea that the safety net has been "looted accidentally [what?] by social workers and sociology PhDs" is just so confused, so factually wrong, and so misguided that your assertion of it really saddens me. If the very idea is not too elitist for your middle-class taste, I would suggest you educate yourself about the facts before you tell your allies that they're actually the enemy. This is exactly the kind of thing that people are talking about when they call Leftist politics a circular firing squad.
In closing, do you have any idea how much I get paid to try to educate White brats who think that most of what Fox News says is true (hint: not a living wage!)? Do you know how hard it is to get any support to do research on cultural correlates to changes in gun laws or how scared I sometimes am at the prospect of getting doxxed by some fuckhead gun nut on a forum that I've used to do that research in hopes of uncovering empirical trends that can be used as the basis for action aimed at justice? Do you think I do this work because it's easy? Where the hell do you get off?
posted by clockzero at 6:54 PM on September 8, 2014 [24 favorites]
See, I actually know people who get paid to study poverty.
I actually do, too. I'm a sociology graduate student. My partner is writing her dissertation about welfare policy, and I personally know several professors who teach and have written influential books on the subject.
I know people who get paid to administer charity funds.
That's not at all the same group that actually studies things like poverty. As in, completely different people, different context, different everything.
I know people who've made very nice upper middle class careers studying and administering poverty stuff - the kinds of careers where you have, like, a really nice house in a really nice neighborhood, and a nice new car and a good retirement account.
I am confused about why you'd lump academics in with people who do administration, especially for private charities. We have totally different funding sources, goals, and positions on virtually everything that matters. The two groups are simply not the same, at all. Apples and oranges.
These aren't bad people, at all, but every time I think about the ~$120,000/year that it costs to pay them and their benefits, I think about how much good that $120,000 could do in my neighborhood if it went to rent, repairs, childcare...
I totally agree that upper-middle-class salaries could benefit people and communities that are, broadly speaking, in a lower SE bracket.
Now, there'd be administrative costs on that, but you could hire and train, for instance, a working class person to administer that money - so you'd get a neighborhood job and neighborhood disbursement of funds.
Or those charities would just pay that person less. Or the person would move to a middle-class neighborhood anyway, which is what a lot of working-class people do. And by the way, that's something you can discover by doing or reading social research.
I don't particularly care that it's not a big chunk of the national budget. (And I know about that pretty well too, because I see how NIH is doing and the impact that's having on basic sciences.) What bothers me is that poverty gets turned into an employment program - not for the poor, but for the sensitive among the well off.
Frowner, I generally have a lot of respect for your thoughts and opinions, but I think you're not seeing who are your allies and who are your enemies right now. The idea that making a career out of studying poverty should be characterized as an "employment program...for the sensitive among the well-off" is wrong (and I mean, empirically wrong) on so many levels. Many of the most prominent scholars of poverty in America do not come from "well off" families, and they often study it because they believe they can contribute to positive social change by doing good social science. Many of the ones I know are also involved in community organizing, (not) incidentally.
More importantly, we are the ones who provide the only direct experience that most people will ever have with empirically-informed alternative viewpoints about what is natural and what is right when it comes to the distribution of resources in society. Most students (of all backgrounds) come into our classrooms thinking that the poor are poor because they're lazy, and that Black people should really just try harder and not take advantage of welfare so much. Every day, graduate students, adjuncts and professors work against those spurious and damaging perceptions by educating people about social reality. I think that itself is tremendously valuable, and I am just baffled that anyone could so casually claim that the extremely hard and almost universally unappreciated work of educating citizens and doing original social research into poverty is some easy-peasy "jobs program" for "sensitive" people who are, apparently, "well-off." I'll have to inform my friends and colleagues that their working-class backgrounds, which spurred them into the study of poverty to begin with, are actually fake, and by the way thank you so damn much for socially promoting me as well.
And it bothers me that the news we're getting is "a study shows that poor people in shitty neighborhoods are traumatized by seeing corpses". That study is necessary to prove that poor people aren't some kind of lower animal.
I think that's a really tendentious way to interpret that work. The point there (to my mind, anyway) isn't that poor people have reactions similar to those of not-poor people in response to trauma, but that a certain kind of life event that is common in impoverished urban environments has an effect which, it is now empirically demonstrated, was before largely regarded as only affecting people like soldiers or maybe some police or emergency first-responders. Whether you and I like it or not, the world outside of social justice advocacy and academia cares more about what can be impartially demonstrated than about what can be passionately claimed, and we can use both impartial demonstrations of what's happening in the world along with that passionate advocacy to effect real systemic change. I mean, if you're not too proud and too pure for partnership with us, of course.
In my solidly middle class neighborhood growing up, we got trauma counselors when there was one incident of visible violence in which no one died or was seriously injured - that was just policy.
Well, how nice for you. I sure as hell didn't. But then I'm not from your class, I guess.
And that's because nicely raised white little boys and girls are assumed to be traumatized by even trivial violence, but we need a study so that someone somewhere can write another grant so that perhaps someday we can get some small trial programs for PTSD treatment for a small number of poor people, maybe, and even those poor people will be the most connected, astute and functional because it will be a job and a half even to find out about the resources.
Yeah, and my colleagues are the type of people who do research which - again - empirically demonstrates that, e.g., Black kids tend to have their age over-estimated in comparison to White kids when accused of the same crime, or that the former group is also regarded as physically stronger and emotionally less sophisticated than the latter.
And when we have those trial programs, there will be a handful of [mostly white] therapists, probably kind and decent people, who will spend part of their career arc doing therapy before rising and becoming nonprofit directors at bigger salaries. There will be a couple of senior [almost certainly white] administrators drawing bigger salaries, and there will be [mostly white] grant writers and [mostly white] bookkeepers and [mostly white] foundation staff and [almost exclusively white, and rich too] foundation boards, and then one year the funding will get yanked because the foundation only wants to fund "seed" projects to avoid dependency, and then everyone's out on the street again. It's the whole arc of the money and power that guarantees that very little will change. And, as the man said, it's not in a fellow's interest to notice something if his employment depends on not noticing it...which is why we'll have studies out the ass.
Again, the fact that you're conflating nonprofit work with academic research and teaching about poverty seems strange to me. I am not any more of a fan of that dysfunctional process you describe than you are, and neither are academics, as a group.
In this town, if you're poor and you want to sit down with a caseworker to discuss your options - oh, that's easy. They'll give you the short list of difficult to access free medical care, and the short list of food pantries, and then you'll find out that if you have a serious medical condition or are actually in the process of becoming homeless, you're screwed because there isn't any money.
Those are all structural problems! Why do you think academics have anything to do with perpetuating that? They're the ones who are constantly talking about how problematic they are and how they need to change!
There's lots of caseworkers. There's lots of knowledge. There's almost no halfway houses, subsidized housing, affordable medical care, emergency funding...and that's because of the systematic professionalization and privatization of the safety net, which has resulted in its looting. It's been looted accidentally by social workers and sociology PhDs, true, but it's still looted.
I think it's good that the safety net is professionalized. Do you want people without any training in psychology doing counseling? Should non-trained individuals be administering medical care? I sure as hell don't think so, and I continue to be utterly baffled by the things you're saying right now. What's more, the privatization of the safety net has nothing to do with the fact that people administering health care, mental health care, or other services to poor people are professionals. What factual events or empirical trends are you basing this all on?
The idea that the safety net has been "looted accidentally [what?] by social workers and sociology PhDs" is just so confused, so factually wrong, and so misguided that your assertion of it really saddens me. If the very idea is not too elitist for your middle-class taste, I would suggest you educate yourself about the facts before you tell your allies that they're actually the enemy. This is exactly the kind of thing that people are talking about when they call Leftist politics a circular firing squad.
In closing, do you have any idea how much I get paid to try to educate White brats who think that most of what Fox News says is true (hint: not a living wage!)? Do you know how hard it is to get any support to do research on cultural correlates to changes in gun laws or how scared I sometimes am at the prospect of getting doxxed by some fuckhead gun nut on a forum that I've used to do that research in hopes of uncovering empirical trends that can be used as the basis for action aimed at justice? Do you think I do this work because it's easy? Where the hell do you get off?
posted by clockzero at 6:54 PM on September 8, 2014 [24 favorites]
I really can't go into specifics because it's my job and I don't particularly want it getting back to me, but in the actual example I exaggerated, the fact is that a group with certain needs had the funding for those needs taken away and put towards a study to see if those needs were really the most important needs to be met, with the immediate effect of those needs no longer being met, and a long term effect of other people (very, very erroneously) assuming that those needs were not important enough to be met, simply because the fed/state decided not to care about it and the primary private donor decided that the lack of public funding meant that the program had no intrinsic value, which was an appallingly incorrect reading of the situation and one that I am still deeply furious over.
And you realize that this is a totally different problem than the one you were complaining about before, right?
posted by clockzero at 7:13 PM on September 8, 2014
And you realize that this is a totally different problem than the one you were complaining about before, right?
posted by clockzero at 7:13 PM on September 8, 2014
The article in the OP is in Essence magazine and presumably has the best chance of reaching readers who, like my colleague, have PTSD from growing up in dangerous neighborhoods, or are themselves still living in dangerous neighborhoods and want to protect their kids.
The therapist in the article seems to have come from a similar background as the PTSD patient and had no problem gaining her trust.
From reading the comments to the article it seems like just acknowledging that this is an issue can bring some relief.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:25 PM on September 8, 2014
The therapist in the article seems to have come from a similar background as the PTSD patient and had no problem gaining her trust.
From reading the comments to the article it seems like just acknowledging that this is an issue can bring some relief.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:25 PM on September 8, 2014
Jesus wept. I only got as far as the fourth paragraph before I had to stop for a minute and pull myself together.
We really just need to quit screwing around and have universal healthcare in this country. How in the hell are people supposed to get jobs and do all the stuff poor people get chastised to do if they're traumatized? 30% have PTSD? That certainly puts the labor force participation rate in perspective.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:48 PM on September 8, 2014
We really just need to quit screwing around and have universal healthcare in this country. How in the hell are people supposed to get jobs and do all the stuff poor people get chastised to do if they're traumatized? 30% have PTSD? That certainly puts the labor force participation rate in perspective.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:48 PM on September 8, 2014
Great article, thank you for posting it! Something not mentioned in the article but which I've been reading about lately is the impact of trauma on long-term physical well being. Check out this Kaiser study showing the increase in hospitalizations for autoimmune disease of people who had multiple Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs), for example.
posted by latkes at 7:50 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by latkes at 7:50 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
And of course, once you throw epigenetics into the mix, it stops being even as simple as genes plus environment-- a lot of what we consider genetic really just means heritable, i.e. NOT on the hard DNA... and is very much influenced by environmental variables across multiple generations.
posted by xarnop at 7:58 PM on September 8, 2014
posted by xarnop at 7:58 PM on September 8, 2014
People adapting to multi-generational trauma by becoming more emotionally numb to it does not sound maladaptive. But does seem like it would increase risk of perpetuating harmful behavior while numb to the amount of harm it's causing. And might require other compromises in functioning to achieve.
posted by xarnop at 8:01 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by xarnop at 8:01 PM on September 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
And you realize that this is a totally different problem than the one you were complaining about before, right?
You mean the one I specifically stated was an exaggerated hypothetical example? Yes, I am aware of that.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:01 PM on September 8, 2014
Head Start now has a program
posted by rtha at 8:17 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
that addresses the high incidence of complex trauma that negatively impacts the lives of 3- to 5-year-old children.This trauma includes, but is not limited to:Yay.
- Family and/or community violence
- Family members’ arrest and/or incarceration
- Caregiver substance abuse or untreated mental illness
- Homelessness
- Separation from their parents
- Family member’s death
posted by rtha at 8:17 PM on September 8, 2014 [5 favorites]
I'm pretty sure I got PTSD from working in an urban school that basically fit all the stereotypical markers of a bad school in a bad neighborhood. I didn't want to admit it because it seemed ludicrous. For one, I wasn't in a literal war zone, and I got to go home every night. It took a long while to come around and acknowledge how much emotional stress I went through in that time. I can't imagine what my students must have had to process considering they rarely got out of that neighborhood. In the last few years that district has been making a push to bring healthcare workers into the schools, and I personally believe its the best money they've ever spent on trying to improve the children's lives.
posted by lownote at 8:29 PM on September 8, 2014
posted by lownote at 8:29 PM on September 8, 2014
You mean the one I specifically stated was an exaggerated hypothetical example? Yes, I am aware of that.
I meant that the ostensible problem of too much federal funding for research on poverty would, in any case, not be related to the problem of private charities being able to exercise their discretion to run their own organizations in sub-optimal ways.
posted by clockzero at 10:32 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
I meant that the ostensible problem of too much federal funding for research on poverty would, in any case, not be related to the problem of private charities being able to exercise their discretion to run their own organizations in sub-optimal ways.
posted by clockzero at 10:32 PM on September 8, 2014 [3 favorites]
This may get a bit rambly but since the thread seems to be stopping anyway, I feel like it's extremely important to address the genetics as disease model proposal. I'm not saying there aren't diseases that LITERALLY are injury to the gene's like down syndrome- but the idea that being traumatized by horrible life circumstances is innately a DISEASE is not a science base theory. There is no evidence behind it,and it proposes that we treat horrific life pain as a medical disease because it allows us to dehumanize those going through it and to see THEM AS THE PROBLEM.
Do we think addressing the horrors in certain racial communities is better addressed by more meds and treatments to damage people's brains so they can't remember what's happened to them? (Something people who LACK PTSD may already be good at, but interestingly people without PTSD symptoms may still display other effects of damage from their traumatic experiences and there may be trade offs of different types of coping mechanisms)
People with big hearts, with deep souls, who mourn deeply and who have a deeper sense of justice and of the feeling nature of human beings may experience more horror and disbelief at traumatic experiences not because a diseased nature of their genes but exactly because of some aspects of their character that are precious and good.
Take the recent thread about about young people in the UK who are despondent from a lack of work. Is the solution more medical diagnostics and treatment? Are the people who are despondent of inferior genetic quality? It's sociological, cultural, and political what aspects of the human character we want to stuff into the medical model so they can be labelled, pathologized, and to make the problem with THE PERSON rather than the circumstance for which that person may be right to feel everything in their being fight against, and sometimes turning it inward isn't really an act of thinking you're at fault, it's an act of mercy in refraining from taking it out on those who deserve it.
posted by xarnop at 6:49 AM on September 9, 2014
Do we think addressing the horrors in certain racial communities is better addressed by more meds and treatments to damage people's brains so they can't remember what's happened to them? (Something people who LACK PTSD may already be good at, but interestingly people without PTSD symptoms may still display other effects of damage from their traumatic experiences and there may be trade offs of different types of coping mechanisms)
People with big hearts, with deep souls, who mourn deeply and who have a deeper sense of justice and of the feeling nature of human beings may experience more horror and disbelief at traumatic experiences not because a diseased nature of their genes but exactly because of some aspects of their character that are precious and good.
Take the recent thread about about young people in the UK who are despondent from a lack of work. Is the solution more medical diagnostics and treatment? Are the people who are despondent of inferior genetic quality? It's sociological, cultural, and political what aspects of the human character we want to stuff into the medical model so they can be labelled, pathologized, and to make the problem with THE PERSON rather than the circumstance for which that person may be right to feel everything in their being fight against, and sometimes turning it inward isn't really an act of thinking you're at fault, it's an act of mercy in refraining from taking it out on those who deserve it.
posted by xarnop at 6:49 AM on September 9, 2014
And I will add that while for middle and even lower middle class people with jobs or family support that equals more than minimum wage- the expansion of new ideas about PTSD means OPTIONS, and CHOICES--- for the poor, unemployed, or low wage earning person, it often means more labeling, being subjected to people with more power than you defining who you are, how you're allowed to define yourself and your pain, and treatment options that reflect only that particular person with powers willingness to consider your pain or suffering a medical condition. Defining aspects of a persons very self or sense of their own identity as an illness and giving everyone around them permission to dismiss their pain as diseased and erroneous thinking/emotions can often work against the very recovery and empowerment of people it's supposed to help, and for the poor they can't just go find one of the good therapists who will actually take the time to work through things with them.
People who cry when someone punches them are not more diseased than people who don't. People who experience intense pain for years when they see a horrific death, are not genetically inferior to those who don't even if there could be aspects of their gene's influencing that aspect of themselves.
People with a sense of compassion and understanding for the ranges of responses normal healthy good people can have to trauma or terrible conditions have already been willing to see such people as equals who deserve the extra care and emotional support their emotions are telling them they need. The medical label is about defining the amound of support some people need as WRONG, and needing to force them to stop needing that support. Often it's the people who know what it's like to need love at such depths who can be the best at giving it when we support and empower them.
I'm going to go on in the event anyone feels like listening to this rambing about a friend of mine who is a woman of color, and a social worker who is too ill to work in her field because she can't afford the level of support services she needs to recover from her own trauma and pain. We have talked about things she wished existed... a place where she could get the support, mentorship, and nurturing her family was too damaged to provide. A place where she could take a break from working, or work part time while doing therapeutic activities, and being supported with the healthy lifestyle activities, emotional affirmations, and nutritious food that promotes healing and wellness. A place where she is a seen as a human being who needed more love, nurturing, and stability than was every there for her, and is now in pain and suffering and was unable to develop the same level of health and skill sets as other people. A human, not a disease. A human- JUST THE SAME AS ANYONE ELSE who could just as easily have been broken by such circumstance. Instead she has been ATTACKED by police officers when needing mental health care- HAND CUFFED. She has described being sexual assaulted and it left me in the horrible position of not knowing how to help-- some of the other claims she made that I thought were outrageous turned out to be true, like that TWO of her coworkers in a social work job she was at turned out to have killed themselves. And I believe her, but when sexual assault claims rely on personal testimony those defined as mentally ill have their rights to defend themselves and be believed removed. THEY ARE RAPABLE, by anyone. They are people who can be assaulted and in this case by white men who see a mentally ill woman of color as disposable, existing to be used for whatever they want.
SHE HAS EVERY RIGHT TO FEEL BROKEN. Not because she has diseased gene's but because she's a fucking human being who needs and deserve entire worlds better than this shit. Fuck this world, and the human beings that have done this shit.
posted by xarnop at 7:21 AM on September 9, 2014 [4 favorites]
People who cry when someone punches them are not more diseased than people who don't. People who experience intense pain for years when they see a horrific death, are not genetically inferior to those who don't even if there could be aspects of their gene's influencing that aspect of themselves.
People with a sense of compassion and understanding for the ranges of responses normal healthy good people can have to trauma or terrible conditions have already been willing to see such people as equals who deserve the extra care and emotional support their emotions are telling them they need. The medical label is about defining the amound of support some people need as WRONG, and needing to force them to stop needing that support. Often it's the people who know what it's like to need love at such depths who can be the best at giving it when we support and empower them.
I'm going to go on in the event anyone feels like listening to this rambing about a friend of mine who is a woman of color, and a social worker who is too ill to work in her field because she can't afford the level of support services she needs to recover from her own trauma and pain. We have talked about things she wished existed... a place where she could get the support, mentorship, and nurturing her family was too damaged to provide. A place where she could take a break from working, or work part time while doing therapeutic activities, and being supported with the healthy lifestyle activities, emotional affirmations, and nutritious food that promotes healing and wellness. A place where she is a seen as a human being who needed more love, nurturing, and stability than was every there for her, and is now in pain and suffering and was unable to develop the same level of health and skill sets as other people. A human, not a disease. A human- JUST THE SAME AS ANYONE ELSE who could just as easily have been broken by such circumstance. Instead she has been ATTACKED by police officers when needing mental health care- HAND CUFFED. She has described being sexual assaulted and it left me in the horrible position of not knowing how to help-- some of the other claims she made that I thought were outrageous turned out to be true, like that TWO of her coworkers in a social work job she was at turned out to have killed themselves. And I believe her, but when sexual assault claims rely on personal testimony those defined as mentally ill have their rights to defend themselves and be believed removed. THEY ARE RAPABLE, by anyone. They are people who can be assaulted and in this case by white men who see a mentally ill woman of color as disposable, existing to be used for whatever they want.
SHE HAS EVERY RIGHT TO FEEL BROKEN. Not because she has diseased gene's but because she's a fucking human being who needs and deserve entire worlds better than this shit. Fuck this world, and the human beings that have done this shit.
posted by xarnop at 7:21 AM on September 9, 2014 [4 favorites]
The medical label is about defining the amound of support some people need as WRONG, and needing to force them to stop needing that support.
That is not in any way universally true, though. Diagnoses are not judgments of someone's self-worth; they're an acknowledgment that this person's coping mechanisms have been overwhelmed by the current situation. Those diagnoses can then qualify that person for social services to fill in some of those needs.
And diagnoses of PTSD don't absolve us of trying to change the situation that's causing the trauma, in addition to providing resources to the people affected.
The US healthcare system is broken, in a lot of ways, but a diagnosis is not a character judgment.
posted by jaguar at 9:44 AM on September 9, 2014 [1 favorite]
That is not in any way universally true, though. Diagnoses are not judgments of someone's self-worth; they're an acknowledgment that this person's coping mechanisms have been overwhelmed by the current situation. Those diagnoses can then qualify that person for social services to fill in some of those needs.
And diagnoses of PTSD don't absolve us of trying to change the situation that's causing the trauma, in addition to providing resources to the people affected.
The US healthcare system is broken, in a lot of ways, but a diagnosis is not a character judgment.
posted by jaguar at 9:44 AM on September 9, 2014 [1 favorite]
Maybe communities could develop a corps of street mental health medics, Emergency Mental Health Technicians, smart caring people serving in their own communities. A few months of rigorous training provided for free, and support and follow-up.
posted by mareli at 12:14 PM on September 9, 2014
posted by mareli at 12:14 PM on September 9, 2014
This is why we need more minority therapists/social workers/psychiatrists and more support for youth in these communities who might be able to somehow grow up and get out, obtain some training in healthcare or counseling, and then return to and support the communities in which they grew up.
We often don't want to.
I am a minority social worker. You could not pay me any amount of money to return to the shitty neighborhood I grew up in and live there. You would have to pay me an exorbitant amount of money to get me simply to drive, bus, or walk there to work every day. And I do mean exorbitant.
When I was a little girl, I dreamed of getting the fuck out of that place, as did many of my peers. And we did. Why should we have to go back just so that other people can feel good about the diversity of their programs?
posted by corb at 12:58 PM on September 9, 2014 [6 favorites]
We often don't want to.
I am a minority social worker. You could not pay me any amount of money to return to the shitty neighborhood I grew up in and live there. You would have to pay me an exorbitant amount of money to get me simply to drive, bus, or walk there to work every day. And I do mean exorbitant.
When I was a little girl, I dreamed of getting the fuck out of that place, as did many of my peers. And we did. Why should we have to go back just so that other people can feel good about the diversity of their programs?
posted by corb at 12:58 PM on September 9, 2014 [6 favorites]
"You could not pay me any amount of money to return to the shitty neighborhood I grew up in and live there."
That was the other thing about my friend who was doing emergency work with impoverished mentally ill people. Two people working along side her committed suicide and she suffered a mental health break down shortly after.
We absolutely need involvement of marginalized voices to lead the way, we need self determination and choice in the types of care offered to support and empower people- but the direct care service positions can be extremely traumatic- for people who are NOT previously traumatized and even more so for people who already carry the scars or ongoing wounds and injuries from their own horrors. Let us try to give people carrying such weights a break, and be in service of meeting those needs, in an empowering way, but without asking people already drowning to do the heaviest lifting of carrying themselves while broken.
Other things we need to do is ensure that financial resources and wide range of support services and healthy lifestyle services are available, including help finding safe and supported housing for families, family care services to help families where parents are coping with disability, mobility issues, or mental health difficulties, and more programs to help parents spend time bonding with and healing with their children in ways that make sense with their community norms. Families have a great capacity to heal and support each other if you actually give them the time and rest and healthy environment to spend with each other. For some reason the same people who know how very fragile white children are if they don't have a parent cooking them fresh meals and looking after them and helping them with homework in the afternoons have a huge hard on for demonizing people of color for trying to find ways to be with and bond with their kids and see any such efforts an mooching and leeching (and some of these attitudes have unfortunately occasionally leaked over to the liberal end where early day care or full time school for low income children are often proposed before supports to help families be able to stay home and care for their children (when they want to) is considered. I want free/low cost day care and after-school care too, I'm not arguing against that, we just need to be looking at more than that to help vulnerable people meet their children's needs, who often may have even greater emotional needs due to the level of trauma and stress they've been exposed to.
posted by xarnop at 2:29 PM on September 9, 2014
That was the other thing about my friend who was doing emergency work with impoverished mentally ill people. Two people working along side her committed suicide and she suffered a mental health break down shortly after.
We absolutely need involvement of marginalized voices to lead the way, we need self determination and choice in the types of care offered to support and empower people- but the direct care service positions can be extremely traumatic- for people who are NOT previously traumatized and even more so for people who already carry the scars or ongoing wounds and injuries from their own horrors. Let us try to give people carrying such weights a break, and be in service of meeting those needs, in an empowering way, but without asking people already drowning to do the heaviest lifting of carrying themselves while broken.
Other things we need to do is ensure that financial resources and wide range of support services and healthy lifestyle services are available, including help finding safe and supported housing for families, family care services to help families where parents are coping with disability, mobility issues, or mental health difficulties, and more programs to help parents spend time bonding with and healing with their children in ways that make sense with their community norms. Families have a great capacity to heal and support each other if you actually give them the time and rest and healthy environment to spend with each other. For some reason the same people who know how very fragile white children are if they don't have a parent cooking them fresh meals and looking after them and helping them with homework in the afternoons have a huge hard on for demonizing people of color for trying to find ways to be with and bond with their kids and see any such efforts an mooching and leeching (and some of these attitudes have unfortunately occasionally leaked over to the liberal end where early day care or full time school for low income children are often proposed before supports to help families be able to stay home and care for their children (when they want to) is considered. I want free/low cost day care and after-school care too, I'm not arguing against that, we just need to be looking at more than that to help vulnerable people meet their children's needs, who often may have even greater emotional needs due to the level of trauma and stress they've been exposed to.
posted by xarnop at 2:29 PM on September 9, 2014
Oh and jaguar, I agree with you, when they're used in the right context they can be used to help people get support, understand, heal, and empower themselves. But we need to be a little more hands off in rigid adherence to clinical labeling undermining self determination or the right of a person to validate their pain and emotions. It's just an area we should all exercise awareness and tread carefully, and realize that even professionals mess this up at times.
posted by xarnop at 2:41 PM on September 9, 2014
posted by xarnop at 2:41 PM on September 9, 2014
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This. Children in some New Orleans neighborhoods are repeatedly traumatized by shootings and other types of violence, exacerbating the problem of baseline Katrina trauma. There are even fewer resources to "help people cope with the mental and emotional aftermath of trauma" than there were pre-Katrina.
posted by Anitanola at 4:01 PM on September 8, 2014 [9 favorites]