Data can help tackle childhood trauma at the community level [KansasCity.com]

Samantha Sangenito 11/14/164:00 AM

Kansas City’s Resilient KC initiative, a partnership of Healthy KC and Trauma Matters KC, supports the emerging “upstreamist” movement in health care. The concept is to address health problems before they emerge as individual or community-centered health issues. Resilient KC targets community-based trauma.

Long-term and often invisible damage can be caused by childhood abuse and neglect, a troubled home or toxic stress. These factors can influence an individual’s physical and behavioral health throughout life — and even result in early death. Research suggests that this damage is compounded by multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

No Missouri or Kansas community is immune from these factors. Sadly, some are at high risk for all.

[For more of this story, written by Tom Bell and Herb B. Kuhn, go to http://www.kansascity.com/opin...3.html#storylink=cpy]

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Corinna WestMember

To say it more clearly:

Well, the results of trauma are important: Increased suicide, substance use, mental health labels, physical health issues, more domestic violence, more incest, etc. BUT that happens in the same rates in rich neighborhoods as in poor neighborhood.

Q: So why is the data reported showing higher levels of trauma in poor neighborhoods?

A: Because the ACES survey is biased against working parents, it doesn't asses the types of harm that middle class young people experience, it doesn't assess medical harm, and it doesn't count for the relativity of trauma.

This is not a neighborhood thing, this is a universal thing, and these hospital bigwigs are pointing fingers at low income communities when ALL communities are affected. I'm tired of these blog posts about "life is horrible for poor people."

How about, "These neighborhoods obviously know something about how to process trauma more effectively. Because their trauma scores are higher, but the trauma effects are still the same."

Rather than pointing at those zip codes and saying, "We gotta help..."

How about looking around and figuring out what they know that Johnson county is missing?

11/14/1612:55 PM

Corinna WestMember

This is just rich people saying "it's hard to be poor."

If the ACES survey included questions on authoritarian parents, on medical harm trauma, on the descrimination after getting a childhood psych label, on high money parents who pressure kids to be successful, etc. there is plenty if not more trauma in the rich neighborhoods. I saw more way fear on kids' faces at Blue Valley North than at Wyandotte high. Conformity in Johnson county eats kids up.

Which is why drug use rates are actually higher for rich people. And so is the psych diagnosis rate. So is domestic violence, so is incest. All the same or more in rich communities.

So a lot of the data is just higher in poor communities because of definitional issues with how the survey questions are phrased, and the bias against working parents.

Medical harm is one of the worst traumas at all because then your health care is forever compromised.

Stop finger pointing at certain zip codes because trauma is everywhere. Use a less biased survey tool and you'll see this is not a "poor community" thing.

11/14/1610:04 AM

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