Trauma and Health Outcomes

How do you improve your life? Many of us assume that flourishing in the face of adversity requires a certain kind of mindset . Believing in your power, staying focused on future goals, being proactive, and leveraging social relationships are four outlooks that can help, many of us suspect, in overcoming life’s obstacles. Driven by the belief that people can change their lives by thinking differently, public organizations in the UK and the US have made a deliberate effort over the past decade...

We all know what stress feels like physically — though the symptoms vary by person. Some people experience shakiness or a racing heart, while others develop muscle tension, headaches or stomach aches. But what we might not realize is that our physiological responses to life’s stresses and strains can have deeper, less obvious, repercussions for just about every organ and system in the body. “I think people really underestimate just how big the effects are,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser,...

Takeaways: Racism is trauma and should be treated as such in any comprehensive trauma-informed care framework. Trauma-informed care requires a nuanced understanding of not only how trauma impacts the lives and care of patients, but the root causes behind that trauma. This brief offers practical considerations to help health systems and provider practices incorporate a focus on racial equity to enhance trauma-informed care efforts. It draws from the experiences of two federally qualified...

Syndemic Theory (ST) provides a framework to examine mutually enhancing diseases/health issues under conditions of social inequality and inequity. ST has been used in multiple disciplines to address interacting infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health conditions. The theory has been critiqued for its inability to measure disease interactions and their individual and combined health outcomes. This article reviews literature that strongly suggests a syndemic between...

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...

Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...

Weight bias is a moving target. It is moving from a shout to a quiet murmur, from explicit shaming to implicit insults. In 2015, a peer-reviewed medical journal would publish advice to tell patients bluntly that obesity is their fault.

"The government has recently announced a strategy aimed at reducing obesity in the UK. It will introduce a ban on unhealthy food advertisements on TV before a certain hour, end “buy one, get one free” junk food deals, and create more comprehensive calorie contents on food and drinks. The government has also launched the Better Health campaign, to motivate overweight and obese people to lose weight. The programme offers tools and support from NHS weight management services, including a Better...

"When Jackson Morgan thinks about who he was at age 18 and 19 — before the pandemic — he puts his head down and pushes his feet into the sand outside his family's house on Plum Island. “The guy I was a year ago, I was very different. I mean, I was a hothead. I had anger issues and stuff,” Morgan says. “I would damn near blackout when I got really mad and start to fight, and I wouldn’t remember bits and pieces of it.” But the pandemic changed everything for Morgan. When COVID-19 took the...

When you consider the word trauma in relation to food, health and eating what does it conjure up? In what ways is trauma relevant to dietetic practice? What does it even mean? In this article, I briefly introduce the concept of trauma as used in public health, social justice activism and counselling.

MIDUS study looks at individual adverse childhood experiences and their impacts on future diabetes. An adverse childhood experience (ACE) is any experience that produces long-lasting stress in a child’s life and leads to worse overall health, both psychological and physical as an adult. Research has shown that even a single ACE increases the risk of diabetes, but little is known about the mechanism behind this phenomenon or how to prevent its occurrence. Currently the CDC only recommends...

https://conscienhealth.org/2018/12/inheritance-of-trauma/