maybe if we ignore trauma, it will go away.
"Alarmingly, the need to ignore the reality of trauma in people's lives also pervades medical school departments of psychiatry, where the response to increasing levels of traumatization in society has generally been to ignore it. As was the case during previous pandemics of violence in society, the study of trauma and of its impact on the development of psychopathology runs the danger of becoming marginalized again. Medical students and psychiatric residents learn exhaustively about relatively obscure illnesses such as Huntington's chorea and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which do not confront them with the problems related to abuse and violence, while trauma-related disorders receive scant attention. This neglect is illustrated by the following:
In 1992, 2,936,000 children in the United States were reported to have been abused and/or neglected (National Victim Center, 1993), and a substantial proportion of these are likely to develop trauma-related psychiatric disorders. However, as of the beginning of 1996, there was precisely one published controlled psychopharmacological study of the treatment of PTSD in children in the entire world literature (Famularo, Kinscherff, & Fenton, 1988). By contrast, in the past decade there have been 13 controlled studies on the psychopharmacological treatment of children with OCD, and 36 on the treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This latter disorder is of particular interest, since it has a high degree of comorbidity with PTSD. For example, Putnam (1994) found that of a sample of sexually abused girls, 28% met diagnostic criteria for ADHD, compared with 4% of a nontraumatized control group. Yet in non of these 36 case studies on children with ADHD did the investigators measure past histories of trauma, comorbidity with PTSD, or the effects of the pharmacological agent studied on trauma-related symptomatology. "
Traumatic Stress, Van der Kolk et al, pg 31
(emphasis added)
In 1992, 2,936,000 children in the United States were reported to have been abused and/or neglected (National Victim Center, 1993), and a substantial proportion of these are likely to develop trauma-related psychiatric disorders. However, as of the beginning of 1996, there was precisely one published controlled psychopharmacological study of the treatment of PTSD in children in the entire world literature (Famularo, Kinscherff, & Fenton, 1988). By contrast, in the past decade there have been 13 controlled studies on the psychopharmacological treatment of children with OCD, and 36 on the treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This latter disorder is of particular interest, since it has a high degree of comorbidity with PTSD. For example, Putnam (1994) found that of a sample of sexually abused girls, 28% met diagnostic criteria for ADHD, compared with 4% of a nontraumatized control group. Yet in non of these 36 case studies on children with ADHD did the investigators measure past histories of trauma, comorbidity with PTSD, or the effects of the pharmacological agent studied on trauma-related symptomatology. "
Traumatic Stress, Van der Kolk et al, pg 31
(emphasis added)