Reposting -- Painful Questions: What Happens when Doctors Uncover Adverse Childhood Experiences?

“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practising medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (Childhood Disrupted, pg.228)  

Unhindered abuse can launch a helpless child towards an adolescence and adulthood in which their brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines. 

It’s during their initial years of life that children have very malleable minds, like a dry sponge squeezed and released under water, thus they’re exceptionally vulnerable to whatever rearing environment in which they happened to have been placed by fate. 

A psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s fundamental human right, especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.