Addressing students' social, emotional and behavioral stress -- not truama -- when they return to school [smartbrief.com]

From the article:

“According to the US Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013), individual trauma results -- through an event, a series of events, or a set of experiential circumstances -- from exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. Trauma has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual well-being.

“For students, their most common stressors include those related to academic frustration and failure; homework and tests; boyfriend/girlfriend and other peer relationship issues; teasing and bullying; gender status and sexual orientation; racial or cultural prejudice and discrimination; poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity; and physical or other limitations or disabilities. While significant, these stressors rarely meet the definition of trauma and, consistent with Lott, interventions for them -- especially in school -- generally differ.

“Thus, even including the pandemic, more students are affected by stress than trauma. As such, first and foremost, schools need to be stress-sensitive and informed. The popular press recommendation that schools be “trauma-informed” is too specialized and narrow. Moreover, a recent review of over 7,000 studies that evaluated school-based trauma-informed programs and that were published during the last ten years, found that none of the studies were methodologically sound enough to validate the efficacy of any of the programs analyzed.”

My thoughts, concerns, questions:

I am not a mental health professional and I have experienced lots of trauma so my understanding comes from lived experience and much reading, research, writing. I question whether or not others have an issue with the narrow definition of trauma detailed above wouldn’t apply to some of the “common stressors” — when perceived through the lens of today’s violence-charged times? 

Experiencing hate-filled racism, being bullied in a way that includes threats to the child or their loved ones, being homeless and hungry, being too poor to afford life-saving medication and seeing one’s parents struggling to make choices between food and medication, sure would seem life threatening to many adults. Through a child’s eyes those experiences could seem all the more life-and-death.

When news shows people being profiled and killed in large part because of the color of their skin, and when any little cough or spike in temperature could be the virus, and the threats of eviction, homelessness and living in the car or at a shelter face many kids, I just don’t see those threats as not being perceived as life-threatening.  

Maybe the difference is between life-threatening and threatening life as we knew it.  But for some kids, the “many of the common stressors”  would, in my estimation, qualify as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.”  Whether real or imagined isn’t included in the SAMSHA description of trauma. Perhaps it should be? In this exceptionally traumatic time and emotion-charges time, perception can seem all the more real. 

I agree on a strengths-based approach. And I would say that any acting out now would best be seen as a need for positive attention with the proverbial questions of “What’s happening?” and “How can I help?” be being asked instead of “What’s wrong with you?” or “Why are you doing that?”  

During what appears to be an unprecedented time of domestic violence and child abuse (unprecedented in modern times), and trauma or “common stressors”, meeting children — people— with safety, acceptance, and a desire to first understand seems like a best practice.  

Thoughts?
 

Carey Sipp