Title: How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime
Presenter’s Name: Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris
Date: Feb 17, 2015
Video Link: https://youtube.com/watch? v=95ovIJ3dsNk&feature=share
Response:
The presenter Nadine Burke explains that the children who grow up while their parents struggle with substance abuse or mental health issues have tangible effects of abuse and neglect on their brains. Childhood trauma dramatically increases individuals’ risk of the leading causes of death from many life-threatening diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure. She states that early adversities such as neglect, parental substance dependence, marital conflicts, divorce or separation, domestic violence, and abuse during childhood host serious health problems as the “toxic stress” during childhood leaves a child with different changes in the brain as well as a hormonal system over time. She furthers her argument that the stress faced by a child in his/her early stages of development not only affects the immune, mental, physiological, and hormonal systems but also “changes the way the DNA is read and transcribed” (TED, 2015).
Nadine Burke Harris was the first to serve as the “Surgeon General of California” between 2019 and 2022 is an American-Canadian Pediatrician and a pioneer in the treatment of toxic stress that emerges from adverse childhood experiences. She has specialized and works in Adverse Childhood Experiences with the aim and mission to change the way society responds to the lasting damage childhood trauma poses to an individual’s psyche. Burke cites that she saw a firsthand impact of the exposure to childhood trauma on her young patients in a clinic at Bayview-Hunters Point where she dealt with the vulnerable and underserved neighborhoods of San Francisco where only one pediatrician was forced to serve over 10,000 children.
Burke puts forward the scientific research that children are more prone to illnesses and traumas because their fight or flight mechanism when exposes to constant traumas in childhood changes from adaptive and life-saving to maladaptive and life-threatening. She explicitly presents the information from the field of Science that exposure to trauma affects the “developing brains of children” while affecting the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure and reward center of the brain, and inhibiting the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for learning. Measurable differences can be seen in the amygdala, the fear response center, of the affected child’s brain which leads to children engaging in high-risk behavior (TED, 2015).
What I found most interesting while listening to Burke is her passion to serve the underserved community of children in the United States and around the world while throwing her conventional knowledge learned from the degree out of the window and her efforts to research more and more in the field to bring better outcomes. If I had the chance to ask Nadine Burke a question, I’d ask her about how we can better support children who have adverse experiences during their childhood and how we can work to prevent childhood trauma from happening in the first place.
References
TED (Director). (2015, February 17). How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime | Nadine Burke Harris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovIJ3dsNk
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