A light heart and a thin pair of breeches goes through the World. Some people are unfortunate and suffer repeated and often serious traumas—everything from abuse and neglect to persistent community violence and harassment. Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) is the exposure to multiple, chronic traumas, which has a much more pervasive and long-range influence on an individual’s self-concept, on their sense of the World, and on their ability to regulate themselves. If people who suffered from DTD were accurately diagnosed, this would make research and treatment of chronically traumatized children and adults who suffer from pervasive biological and emotional dysregulation, failed or disrupted attachment, problems staying focused and on track, and a hugely deficient sense of coherent personal identity and competence easier to fix. These issues transcend and include almost all diagnostic categories, but treatment that does not put them front and center is more than likely to miss the goal of mental health. With healing mental health issues, our goal is to reduce the amount of stress placed on the person and to apply the lesson of neuroplasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, to rewire the brains and reorganize the minds of people who have been programmed by life itself to experience others as threats and themselves as helpless. Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment. Recognizing the profound effects of trauma and deprivation on child development need not lead to blaming parents. We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids. Nearly every industrialized nation, with the exception of the United States of America, recognizes this and provides some form of guaranteed support to families. Quality early-childhood programs that involve parents and promote basic skills in disadvantaged children more than pay for themselves in improved outcomes. 

Also, speaking of programs to help the disadvantaged, does it make sense to feed antiquated people cookies and cakes for breakfast, and keep them up at all hours of the day and night with fights, loud noise, and blasting music? We could probably save the system money and the individual money by providing them with healthy foods and making sure they are in a relaxing environment where they can rest and enjoy their lives, instead of feeling like they are being held hostage by a dysfunctional building management agency. Many of these people did not come from houses wracked by poverty, domestic violence, nor drug abuse, but in their retirement are forced to live around those types of situations, which scares them and stressed them out beyond belief.  We need to improve their living conditions, as they have more than paid their dues to society. In some communities there are house-visitation programs in which skilled nurses help to provide a safe and stimulating environment for seniors to make sure no one is milking them for their Social Security retirement, nor feeding them sugar, drugs, or soaking them in beer. When people are shown love, they imagine a better future for themselves, instead of fearing that this could be their last day on Earth. When tried with children, from at risk houses, twenty years later the nurse house-visitation system reported that not only were the children were healthier and were less likely to report being abused or neglected than a similar group whose mothers had not been visited. They also were more likely to have finished school, to have stayed out of jail, and to be working in well-paying jobs.  

Economist, instead of reading celebrity gossip, have calculated that every dollar invested in high quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payment, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better paying careers. When I go to Europe to teach, I often am contacted by officials at the ministries of health in the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Asia, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands and asked to spend an afternoon with them sharing the latest research on the treatment of traumatized children, adolescents, seniors, and their families. The same is true for many of my colleagues. These countries have already made a commitment to universal health care, ensuring a guaranteed minimum wage, paid parental leave for both parents after a child is born, and high-quality childcare for all working mothers. Could this approach to public health, preventative maintenance and services to help people stay healthy, have something to do with the fact that the incarceration rate in Norway is 71 per 100,000 people, in the Netherlands 81 per 100,000 people, and the United States of American 781 per 100,00 people, while the crime rate in those countries is much lower than in ours, and the cost of medical care about half? Seventy percent of prisoners in California spent time in foster care while growing up. The United States of America spends $84 billion per year to incarcerate people at approximately $44,000.00 per prisoner (which is almost as much as the average American taxpayer makes in a year); the average American makes $53,657.00 a year. The northern European countries spend a fraction of that amount. Instead, they invest in helping parents to raise their children in safe and predictable surroundings. Their academic test scores and crime rates seem to reflect the success of those investments. Will men prefer the happiness of others at the neglect of their own?