Trauma Creep: What it Looks Like on the Ground—and How to Stop It
A Case Study in Missouri—and a Zoom-out to the Broader Harms
This report originally appeared at Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
In a recent piece, Restoration News reported on how three sub-agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) used Orwellian distortions of language to create “trauma creep.” Restoration News has also reported how this “trauma creep” at HHS coincided with a similar creep among criminal justice and educational theorists pushing Restorative Justice and Social Emotional Learning (SEL). The current report will show the effect of the convergence of these successive and pyramidal trauma creeps on children, in one of the most unlikely places: deep-red Missouri.
The state has voted for a Republican presidential candidate in every election since 2000; every state elected official is currently a Republican; and Republicans have supermajorities in the legislature. Nonetheless, Missouri has become, in the space of a decade and a half, a hotbed of trauma-based policies in schools.
In Part I of this series, we explored how each of these sub-agencies built on the other.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) changed the government-sponsored definition of trauma from the American Psychological Association’s (APA)’s, referring to “an emotional response to a [specific] terrible event,” and instead made the definition subjective: “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful...”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as causing the “harms” of trauma, using a broad definition of traumatic experiences and encouraging adults to begin thinking of children’s ordinary experiences as possibly “traumatic.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored studies that expanded trauma-causing experiences to include identity injustices favored by academic progressives: specifically, “community, social, cultural and historical traumas such as racism, poverty, colonialism, disability, homophobia and sexism and their intersectionality.”
Digging into how this happened shows that the driving cause was HHS’s subagencies’ redefinition of trauma, which the influence of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Restorative Justice then helped bring into America’s schools. It also shows the consequences—fear, division, distraction—to America’s children, in Missouri and elsewhere.
(DON'T MISS PART 1 OF THE SERIES: Trauma Creep: Attack the HHS Mental Health Boondoggle To Reform America’s Health System)
Trauma’s Definition Gets Applied to Missouri by its Department of Mental Health
Starting in 2009, Missouri began its journey to becoming a “trauma-informed state” off the efforts of Dr. Patsy Carter, the director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health. That year, an article written by Carter said, in part:
a three-year trauma-informed “early adopters” initiative…[with] five community mental health centers, a state-operated children’s residential center, and the state office of the Division of Youth Services…At the end of three years, [she] convened a statewide “Trauma Roundtable” that included…organizations in the state that had shown leadership in addressing trauma.
In Carter’s telling, a problem her initiative confronted early on was a lack of definition of trauma. This doesn’t make sense, since trauma has been defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as proceeding from specific events, unless a supposed lack of definition for trauma became the excuse for Carter to adopt the looser definition by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency inside HHS, which seems to have been the case. “A growing number of organizations use the definition that SAMHSA has developed,” Carter writes, and this is, indeed, the definition that Carter’s Missouri Trauma Initiative ended up with: a much looser definition than the APA’s, rooting the possibility of trauma in any experience.
The other major justification for Carter’s Trauma Initiative was that, in her telling,
the seminal Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which the US Centers for Disease Control [CDC] and Prevention published in 1998 . . . demonstrated that adverse experiences and chronic stress, particularly in childhood, can harm the developing brain.
As Restoration News has reported, this 1998 study’s definitions of “adverse experiences” and their “harm[s]” was extremely loose, encouraging adults to look to arguably ordinary childhood memories to explain arguably ordinary adult problems. This, in turn, increased the likelihood that adults would address ordinary problems with pharmaceutical solutions sold by companies like the study’s sponsor, Kaiser. What the CDC study hadn’t done, though, was the logical next step: focus on preventing trauma by encouraging young people to see ordinary events in their lives as traumatic. This was the move Carter proceeded to make.
Carter was already on record, in a 2008 report studded with references to the alphabet health agencies, pushing for mental health among children to become a major priority of Missouri government. Among other dubious warning signs she pointed to were an NIH statistic that at least 1 child in a class of thirty will have ADHD and a SAMHSA statistic that 10 to 15 percent of U.S. children have some symptoms of depression. Then, in 2013, speaking to the Missouri News Tribune, Carter brought her focus on children and her focus on trauma explicitly together. She envisioned the use of "a variety of governmental agencies" to "embed mental health in the natural environments children are already in,” especially trauma: "one of the major public health issues of our times," which "is enmeshed with some of our biggest social issues and challenges."
Alive and Well Communities Brings Trauma to School
Carter’s vehicle was the nonprofit which became the driving force in her Trauma Roundtable: Alive and Well. Formed in the mid-2010s, Alive and Well made its special focus trauma. In 2017, one of its founders appeared on St. Louis Public Radio, arguing based on the “seminal” CDC Study from 1998 that “more than 50 percent,” and in fact “nearly two thirds” of Americans suffer from trauma inherited from childhood. That same year, off this theory, Alive and Well entered into a partnership with Carter’s Department of Mental Health to work toward creating a "trauma-informed" state. Specifically, Alive and Well aimed to do what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was urging Americans to do via studies it sponsored: expand trauma’s causes to include identity-based injustices promoted by academic progressives. Specifically, Alive and Well’s mission was to:
recognize the trauma caused by racism...[since] healing is possible only when we understand and acknowledge how trauma, including the trauma of anti-Black racism and white supremacy, are holding us all back from well-being.
What allowed Alive and Well into schools was Missouri Republicans' willingness to partner with a Democratic state legislator who spoke openly about her 2015 suicide attempt, which she said was driven by traumatic childhood experiences. In 2016, this legislator, Genise Monticello, inserted an amendment into a Republican-sponsored bill instructing the Department of Education to establish the "Trauma-Informed Schools Initiative.” The amendment passed with Republican support, and, in 2017, at the request of Carter’s Trauma Roundtable and the Missouri Department of Education, Alive and Well submitted the blueprint for "the Missouri Model for Trauma-Informed Schools.” By 2020, the Missouri Department of Education had partnered with Alive and Well to “provide additional guidance documents, training sessions and engagement strategies” for “students and staff members who may have experienced unprecedented trauma due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In the meantime, helped by virtually limitless federal funding for Social Emotional Learning initiatives supplied by the Biden White House, Missouri appointed 33 Trauma-Informed School Liaisons to spread the message. As of 2022, Alive and Well estimated that it had reached more than 3.6 million students. By this point, Alive and Well was spreading not just the Gospel of Trauma but of trauma-related juvenile justice principles, also backed by Biden White House. Chief among these was Restorative Justice, which Alive and Well called “an effective, alternative approach to discipline in which parties address harm, take accountability, and repair relationships” that “regularly intersects with trauma-informed approaches, as both emphasize uplifting the dignity of persons, doing no harm, and restoration over punitive measures.”
Other Missouri Nonprofits Contribute to Trauma Creep…
Nor was Alive and Well the only trauma-pushing nonprofit active in the area. Nearly two years ago, Restoration News reported on other area operators pushing the same line:
…Project Lab St. Louis, a public charity whose founder is a vocal advocate of SEL, was launched in Normandy Schools Collaborative in Northern St. Louis County. 98.8 percent of the county’s high school students are minority, 53 percent need financial assistance, and the Math-Reading-Science proficiency percentages are an abysmal 5, 18, and 2 percent, respectively. But the change Project Lab helped implement at Normandy didn’t provide more math teachers or better proficiency programs. It instead addressed “causes of toxic stress and trauma in and out of school.”
…Opportunity Trust St. Louis, an “upstart education think tank and advocacy organization” supported heavily by out-of-state-funding, prepared an SEL survey for 10,000 St. Louis-area students across three dozen schools to chronicle “[how teachers] are implementing SEL…[to] address students’ chronic trauma and stress.” It also sponsored the Catalyst Awards, one of whose recipients was Dr. Bonita Jamison, executive director of Integrated Support and Accelerated learning for Ferguson-Florissant: the site of the 2014 Ferguson protests and where 69.2 percent of students need financial assistance, 9 percent of high schoolers are proficient in math, and 32 percent are proficient in reading. Yet Dr. Jamison used the funding for a conference to help students address “significant trauma due to the pandemic, coupled with the racial injustices currently occurring.”
…and Hurt Kids
The effectiveness of these approaches is, to put it mildly, open to question.
Normandy, the beneficiary of Project Lab St. Louis, promises in its handbook to “practice fair, effective behavior management techniques that are culturally proficient and inclusive including Restorative justice practices.” It also promises to “provide safe and engaging learning environments with robust social-emotional wellbeing and trauma-informed supports.” But, as of Spring 2024, Normandy’s classrooms were in crisis, and “teachers [were] getting hurt amid more fights at school”:
“And we were kind of pinned in the corner," said former educator Marla Arinze, describing a recent experience. “I remember that my hands were just numb and my feet were numb” . . . Four separate times, in just a couple of years, she said she was injured while breaking up fights…“I've had neck surgery, I'm still having neurological problems. I've had seizures and strokes," Arinze said.
Ferguson Florissant, the school district serving the area where the 2014 Ferguson riots occurred, and which is serviced by Alive and Well, notes in its handbook that it is “continuing our work to embed restorative practices and trauma-informed care as part of our schools’ culture, climate, and expectations.” But in 2023, in this culture of loosened discipline, one mother said that 42 fights had broken out at one of the high schools in the last school year, and teachers staged strikes or de facto walkouts over violence and drug use.
Correlation, of course, isn’t causation: there’s no “hard proof” that the focus on trauma in these districts created this crisis. But the overwhelming evidence from across the country about the effect of Social Emotional Learning and Restorative Justice, which are rooted in the justification of trauma, suggests that they excused the violence and encouraged it to flourish. And, indeed, Missouri is not the only state where this is happening. What stands out about Missouri is that it’s the deepest of deep red states, and trauma infiltration is happening there, too. In Tennessee and California, New York and Virginia, Minnesota and Oregon, trauma creep has changed the way children study and learn.
Trauma Creep’s Effects—and its End Game
The psychological results of trauma creep, even when assessed by liberals and Leftists, are unencouraging. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, argued that “children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile” and “must be exposed to challenges and stressors…or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults…” Considered more politically, children exposed to trauma theory are not just made to feel weak: they’re also urged to see their lives in terms of identity categories that inflict endless trauma on them. This is a recipe for social hatreds and conflicts, and it’s not a coincidence that many of the most oppressive “social justice” movements in colleges and on the streets specialize in the language of trauma.
Interestingly, some critics of trauma theory are beginning to combat it using the Orwell tactic mentioned in Part I of this series: It’s a way for the powerful and unaccountable to keep control. Specifically, they argue that it offers a way for Liberals to argue that “the institutions of American power, while flawed, [are] in essentially good shape,” and that any problems people are experiencing based off establishment malfeasance can be explained with reference to trauma. In this light, it may not be a coincidence that trauma began its institutional ascent in the 1990s. That was the decade when the psychologically dislocating policies Americans have suffered from really began at the hands of Washington, D.C.: globalization, identity politicking, labor outsourcing, government assaults on religion, government-backed financial conglomeration. In this read, trauma is Washington D.C.’s ultimate red herring: if everyone looks at one culprit (how they think they feel) they won’t examine the real problem (what Washington, D.C. does).
How to Stop Trauma Creep
The answer to the problem is in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s hands. Scale trauma research dramatically back across the DHS and its subsidiaries, so that nonprofit operators and consultants, school administrators and emotionally disturbed legislators no longer have the excuse to inflict it on organizations or kids. Specifically, Secretary Kennedy should direct the Department of Health and Human Services to change its definition of trauma to the approved APA definition, and abolish all programs that do not directly service those affected by that narrowly defined version of trauma.
Trauma has infiltrated our culture these past thirty years. But, as Orwell wrote in the seminal year of 1946, “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes.” Fixing the political-economic root of the rise of trauma, our own deep state and the health outgrowths it funds, may not solve trauma creep, but it will mediate its harms. Doing so would be among the more concrete and effective reforms to our health system that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can make.