By Vikram Patel, The Indian Express, August 8, 2019
When we think of childhood adversity, we imagine the kind of truly horrible stuff which happened to the character of Bobby in the film Judgementall Hai Kya. While I found the film somewhat cringe-worthy, I thought there was at least one figment of a fact which was credible. The protagonist’s mental illness was seeded by the trauma she had experienced in her childhood, her violent father and his extreme jealousy, her parents’ marital strife and, ultimately, their tragic death. Indeed, adversities in childhood are the most important predictor of our mental health, not only in childhood but throughout our lives.
The most memorable line in William Wordsworth’s The Rainbow, that the “child is the father of man”, is a prescient reminder that each of us is the product of our childhood experiences. This was also the inference that Sigmund Freud made when he claimed, based on his assessments of patients with mental health problems, that the experiences in our childhood profoundly influenced our adult well-being. This scientific observation is — at par with Isaac Newton inferring gravity when the apple bounced on his head — amongst the most important in history. But Freud was wrong about actually how childhood adversity leads to mental health problems. This association is not, as he surmised, because of the monsters lurking in our unconscious but, as neuroscience is now showing us, because the brain is immensely malleable in response to the social environment in the first two decades of life.
But childhood adversity isn’t only about the kind of awful and terrifying experiences that marked Bobby’s descent into mental illness. Unremitting fear is the most damaging of all emotional experiences. A vast body of science provides compelling proof of how fear seeps into the deepest recesses of the human brain and leads to profound disturbances in our mental health and, ultimately, in the way we respond to our environments. Its poisonous influence is greatest during childhood; indeed, scientists use the term “toxic stress” to describe the experience of strong, frequent, or prolonged fear on children’s emotional development. What makes such stress particularly toxic is that its effects show up not only in the form of disturbed mental health in childhood but also through the full gamut of disturbed mental health in adulthood, including paranoia, self-harm, depression, addiction and aggression.
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