Experts are realising that trauma – if not managed properly – could be the trigger for doing whatever it takes to get acceptance and power – and be passed down to the next generation.
Humans are getting sadder, more anxious, more distressed and more physically ill, finding modern life increasingly difficult to negotiate, and mental illness and chronic physical illnesses are now reaching record highs.
It’s estimated that 50% of the world’s population will experience a psychological disorder in their lifetime, yet a pitiful portion of that number gets access to mental healthcare, writes counsellor Mia Pienaar in Business Day.
Life expectancy is up in most places worldwide, we have fewer deaths due to infection, and a doctor can keep your heart beating in incredible circumstances. However, mental illness and chronic illness rates are steadily climbing.
Fifty percent is an alarming number, but in my experience as a community counsellor, closer to 80%-90% of people experience psychological illness in their lifetime. Apart from this, dying peacefully in one’s sleep is a rare privilege. It’s more likely to be from cancers, other devastating conditions, suicide, violence and so many other unnatural causes. Suicide is the leading cause of death for 14-15-year-olds.
Why, alongside mind-blowing, limit-pushing technology and innovation, are our minds and bodies becoming more vulnerable to illness?
It would be nice to offer quick, straightforward answers, which are easiest to swallow, but a condition of studying humans is that we never have the luxury of simple cause and effect.
Pollution, physical inactivity, lack of access to nourishing food, sugar addictions, substance abuse, unrelenting stress and chronic sleep deprivation are all detrimental, yet so normalised that many of us don’t even categorise them as unhealthy.
They are also central to our consumer economies. The sale of sugar and substances like alcohol is carefully strategised, using some of the latest statistical and mechanical technologies to make them as cheap, tasty and addictive as possible, with things we are most hooked on, like shopping and junk food, having such enormous potential for generating profits that those in power do not condemn them as unhealthy.
When mental ill-health does get recognised, the medications prescribed are mostly for the “management” of psychological illness and chronic illness, and we must put up with the side effects. Many people find the Western medical approach to chronic illness ineffective, and sometimes even traumatic in itself.
And we have not yet got the basics of medication right, such as their classification. Deran Young, a US psychotherapist and founder of the Black Therapists Rock organisation, has shared her realisation of being taught that McDonald’s is food and mushrooms are drugs.
During the 1960s, research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics and herbs like cannabis was flourishing, pointing to their major potential for the treatment of many ailments. But then US President Jimmy Carter’s Government feverishly punted national propaganda that “drugs” were public enemy number one, launched the US drug classification system, and the classification of all recreational drugs as being “harmful and of no medical benefit”.
The loss of research into these substances has been the greatest tragedy, leaving people to pursue psychedelics and other forms of medicine in unregulated and unsupervised conditions in their desperation to find relief.
The situation has not improved much since Carter’s time. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently maintained the classification of MDMA, a form of ecstasy, as a harmful drug with no medical benefit, ignoring the mounting evidence of its effectiveness in curing conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is notoriously difficult to treat.
MDMA, like cannabis and other psychedelics, might have the potential to permanently cure mental illnesses, not just manage them. But cures are bad for the business of Big Pharma. OxyContin, more potent than heroin, is legal, even though it has destroyed countless lives, while MDMA, less toxic to the brain than caffeine, is illegal.
So, we find ourselves living in unhealthy ways without sufficient resources to implement healthy living or access to effective treatment for the consequences of unhealthy living.
Part of the problem is that we still adhere to the mind-body dichotomy – and beliefs that the body has little to do with mental health. It’s a cycle that can be virtuous or vicious: how we treat our bodies is also how we treat our minds, which shapes how we behave.
Take serotonin, which has so revolutionised treatment through antidepressants. Serotonin is necessary for good mood and sleep, regulating appetite and overall functioning – and is mostly produced in the stomach.
What you eat has a direct effect on the quality of the serotonin your body makes. An unhealthy gut, fed with empty calories of sugar and preservatives, cannot produce optimal serotonin. Your brain can only do so much with substandard neurochemicals.
Expecting your brain to create solutions, stay focused and manage your instincts without proper nutrients and with excess stress, is setting yourself up for failure.
On top of the physical issues affecting our mental health is the simple experience of being human, which goes for the damaging part of it too. We live with unprecedented awareness of global conflict – there may be more peace than ever in history, but we have never had such wide access to viewing and analysing the conflict that remains, wherever on the globe.
Social media has normalised immersion in the details of conflicts, over which most people have no power or control. Powerlessness and hopelessness are known devourers of mental well-being.
Humans have spent most of their time as a species in small, collectivist cultures in which burdens are shared, and traumas healed collectively. Humans have evolved the herd traits of seeking the safety of inclusion, acceptance and belonging.
Before social media, many people’s struggle was to find a satisfying and meaningful social life, including managing boundaries, managing conflicts and achieving authenticity in a small social space.
Now, boundaries have collapsed, and sociability is amplified several times over. Teenagers must gain the acceptance not only of the peers immediately surrounding them, but of global communities; dirty looks and telephone gossip have been replaced by cancel culture and cyberbullying campaigns that can come from anywhere.
Social media
Social media is a neutral phenomenon with both positive and negative effects. It provides entrepreneurial and socialising opportunities that didn’t exist before. During Covid, it probably saved lives by connecting people who were critically isolated.
However, because it amplifies any human experience, we need to be aware of how it shapes fundamental human experience, like belonging, and a sense of meaning and purpose.
With greater exposure to global conflict and distortive social media, is it any wonder that the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 50% of all people suffer from mental health issues?
This is based on what is reported. But what about the person who rigidly sticks to their ways even when it hurts others, ways that are not recognised as the result of mental illness?
The person you know who gambles too much, or shops too much, who is anxious no matter what, who won’t ever go to a psychologist? The criminals who have physically or sexually abused their family, hidden behind family denial and avoidance. The workaholics, who are addicts, but their addiction serves to bring home the bacon, so it is not recognised or reported as a problem.
The countless survivors of rape who have repressed the memory or will never speak out loud about it.
Maybe a simpler question is, how many humans do feel healthy, connected and safe in a meaningful and purposeful life? Many people might be okay; we get by, we survive, it is what it is. But I don’t know many people who are truly mentally well, not consistently.
What’s fascinating about the climbing rates of illness is that not everything is climbing. For example, you are much less likely to die of an infection than before, but obesity-related illness, autoimmune conditions and chronic pain conditions are all going up, as have schizophrenia rates.
In all of these, one key factor has become identified ever sharper. Psychologists, integrative physicians, and neuroscientists have come to understand that trauma, in all of its forms, plays a much larger role in our mental and physical health than previously understood.
In recent years, the concept of intergenerational trauma has come to the forefront. Through the study of epigenetics, researchers have shown that trauma passes down biologically. This is not a fantasy, it’s not an excuse, it is biology.
In a landmark study, researchers showed that children of Holocaust survivors had smaller telomeres than their peers. Telomeres are the little aglets, the metal bits at the end of shoelaces, without which they would be too difficult to thread, and would quickly fray.
Telomeres protect chromosomes in the same way. Shortened telomeres have direct impacts on the instructions passed on chemically by DNA, making it more likely that such instructions are not passed on well.
Making new cells with mistakes in them is a normal and natural phenomenon, and one of the roles of the immune system is to identify and destroy cells produced incorrectly. But with heightened or chronic stress, the human immune system loses its edge and cannot keep up with cleaning out cells produced with mistakes in them.
More mistakes in the production of cells lead to chronic illnesses such as cancer, autoimmune disorders, diabetes and degenerative ones, such as dementia.
In September 2024, at the Masters Events trauma conference at Oxford in the UK, the largest trauma conference hosted annually in Europe, Dr Bessel van der Kolk gave a history of trauma. Van der Kolk was consulted for our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was part of a team that fought for PTSD to be recognised as a valid diagnosis for the first time.
Van der Kolk narrated how “shell shock” was first observed in soldiers returning from World War 1 tours. However, the British Government at the time outlawed this diagnosis because it would affect morale. After World War 1 a commission of inquiry into shell shock concluded that these trauma symptoms were rare and extreme, and that the “morally intact and well-educated” had nothing to fear.
Every claim in that statement was false and probably delayed the understanding of trauma by decades.
Trauma has much more common origins than just war or similar violence. Any event or process that overwhelms the coping mechanisms available to one is traumatic. We now know that trauma causes measurable biological lesions. One possibility offered by Van der Kolk to explain the high mental illness rates was that a kind of intergenerational trauma water-shedding occurs.
The damage caused by generations of conflict, displacement, abuse, poverty, colonisation and so on is accumulating and compounding within the motherboards of our cells, manifesting in weathered DNA and strained nervous systems. These are dumped over a tipping point on to the next generation.
The ACE (adverse childhood experiences) study conducted in California between 1995 and 1997, one of the largest studies of its kind, showed conclusively that humans who experienced adverse childhood experiences were much more likely to experience mental illness, including substance abuse and learning disorders, and that risk compounds with each adverse experience survived.
For example, if you had four adverse childhood experiences, say parental mental illness, parental substance abuse, parental conflict and divorce, you might have a 700% higher chance of developing an addiction to alcohol, developing a chronic physical illness or an early death.
An ACE score above six is associated with a 3 000% increase in the risk of suicide.
A common denominator in autobiographies of celebrities and sports stars? Trauma, before their success, in response to their success, in their relationships. Trauma often is the flowerbed for a superhuman capacity for endurance, for doing whatever it takes to get acceptance, admiration and power.
Most people struggle to engage in physically and psychologically healthy behaviours, environments and relationships. Perhaps through generations of trauma, we have learnt to seek relief and regulation through toeing whatever line makes sense at the time, through quick dopamine fixes and through denial.
This is a common process when clients are in counselling – they want to change but cannot consistently implement the healthy behaviour they want to acquire. This is usually because the strategies for self-regulation and relief of pain that they have used for many years are difficult to let go of.
Some mental illness emerges in the stereotypical forms of psychosis or mood disorders such as bipolar disorder. More are the result of chronic physical illness, socially approved addictions, interpersonal violence and of tyrants of different sizes and shapes hoarding power.
However, we are making progress. Accessibility for different forms of disability is becoming more generally expected, mindfulness and other forms of mental health literacy are being accepted and even encouraged. The newer generations are more aware of unsustainable relationship traits and less willing to submit to traditions or rules that they don’t understand.
We also know what is likely to work: not just psychiatric medication on its own but a holistic range of tools and therapeutic techniques that have proven themselves in practice and research.
BusinessLIVE article – Mental health: a new understanding of trauma is emerging (Restricted access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Does what you eat affect your brain health?
Diet and nutrition play part in mental health
Mental health disorders to affect half the world by 75 – large global study
Mental health illness toll on life expectancy – South African study