Child Trauma Case Study

As a child, it is important to have important relationships with your parents and in society. It is also important to have healthy experiences because these experiences shape the way a person develops. Unfortunately, many times children and young adults experience events that could be deemed traumatic or harrowing and in most cases they don’t fully recover from them. A traumatic event, as defined in a book by Corey Keyes named Women and Depression, is an experience that is life threatening to the self or some close to the self-accompanied by intense fear, horror or helplessness (Keyes et al, 2006). In a study, conducted by The National Survey of Children’s Health, parents were surveyed on nine different types of adversities their children

Due to these children denying and internalizing these events, a lot of them don’t get the help they need in order to overcome their anger in experiencing disturbing events. In article by Sciolla, Glover, Loeb, Zhang, Myers and Wyatt, approximately one- third of women never reveal that they have ever been sexually abused as a child. Two- thirds of women disclose their childhood sexual abuse, however many do it years after the event occurred (Sciolla et al, 2011). People don’t want to reveal that they have been abused because they are ashamed, they may see it as normal and also because they are scared of the consequences. Many people also blame themselves for being abused. Females are more likely to blame themselves for being abused than males and younger females are more likely to blame themselves for childhood sexual abuse than older females are (Sciolla et al, 2011). Children who believe they are the reason for the abuse may take longer to let someone know that they were abused. Children’s judgements of how other people may react to the exposure of their abuse along with their opinions of accountability for the abuse have been connected with the possibility of their disclosure (Sciolla et al, 2011). Due to the unlikeliness of the disclosure of abuse, children are exposed to many mental diseases. One

A regularly used experiment used for studying early life trauma is maternal separation. This experiment is used in children as well as infant animals. A lot of the same changes affiliated with maternal separation stress in animals are related to changes reported in adults who suffer from major depression and post- traumatic stress disorder. The hypothalamic- pituitary- adrenal axis shows abnormalities and impairment of control in both of these disorders (Keyes et al, 2006). Stress that has occurred in early life has been associated with a small hippocampal volume and well as relentless changes in the hypothalamic- pituitary- adrenal axis. Experiencing stressful or traumatic life events are strongly connected to the beginning of major depression episodes. Heightened levels of plasma cortisol and discrepancies in descriptive memory mediated by the hippocampus are some of the thigs that have been reported by patients with unipolar major depressive disorder (Vythilingam et al, 2002). Women who were experiencing depression and had a past history of sexual or physical abuse during the time of the study, which was carried out by Vythilingam and associates, had a greater increase in plasma cortisol and ACTH (Adrenocorticotropic hormone) as a result of the Trier Social Stress Test they were given. Subjects who had a major depressive disorder but did not have a history of abuse had a normal cortisol response (Vythilingam et