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The post in post-traumatic stressNew York Times Posted online:
Sun Dec 30 2012, 02:27 hrsDAVID DOBBS
In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders defined trauma as a recognisable stressor thatwould evoke
significant symptoms of distress in almost everyoneuniversally
toxic, like a poison. But it turns out thatmost trauma victims
rebound to live full, normal lives. That has given rise to a more
nuanced view of traumaless apoison than an infectious agent, a
challenge that most people overcome but that may defeat those
weakened by pasttraumas, genetics or other factors.
The idea was demonstrated vividly in two presentations this fall
at the University of California, Los Angeles, US. Eachdescribed
reframing a classic model of traumatic experienceone in lab rats,
the other in child soldiers.
In the first case, Paul Plotsky, a neurobiologist at Emory
University, described what happened when he tweaked oneof the most
widely used models of how maternal separation affects young rats.
The model was created in the early1990s by Plotsky himself to bring
consistency to the way maternal separation is studied. Earlier
experiments keptmother and pups apart anywhere from one to 24
hours; Plotsky reset those periods to 15 minutes and 180
minutes.
After a 15-minute separation, a mother would typically sniff and
lick each pup, then gather and feed them, all the whileconversing
with them in gentle, ultrasonic warbles. After a 180-minute
separation, however, most mothers would dashabout emitting panicky
squeaks, often stomping on the pups or ignoring them. And for the
rest of their lives, they hadoutsize physiological and behavioural
reactions to stress and challenge.
This 15/180 model quickly became a standard, generating scores
of studies showing that long separations createdanxious rodents
with permanent changes in stress-hormone activity, brain structure
and many other measures.
Then about five years ago, Plotsky was thinking about the
mothers post-separation panic when, he said, it hit me:maybe she
views her environment as unsafe because she and her pups are back
in the same cage as the one theywere taken from. So he upgraded the
simple cage to a complex one. The separated rat family now reunited
not in thekidnapping site but in the antechamber of an eight-room
condo.
Now, even after 180-minute separations, things went fine. Even
if Plotsky separated the family again the next day (oreven eight
days in a row), she would do the same thing, usually choosing a new
room. But maybe the pups stillsuffered? Actually, no. Few showed
any signs of trauma, either immediate or lasting. Trauma seemed now
to rise notfrom the separation alone but from the flavour of the
reunion.
Does the same hold true for humans? A study of former child
soldiers in Nepal suggests that it may. Since 2006, DrBrandon
Kohrt, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at George
Washington University, has followed the fates ofNepalese children
who returned to their villages after serving with the Maoist rebels
during their countrys civil war. All141 in the study, five to 14
years old when they joined the rebels, experienced violence, aside
from their separationfrom family. Yet their postwar mental health
depended not on their exposure to war but on how their families
andvillages received them.
