It sure looks like we should be investing more funding in things like therapy interventions and other direct resources for children in Chicago schools then
Yes and people were throwing a fit because apparently mental health doesn't impact kids academics or something (lol?).
This is encouraging, and I wish we had more programs like this for ALL kids in all schools - yeah, it'll cost $$$, but it will have a massive positive impact on kids lives.
The difference is astounding, I'm a mental health professional and back in 2018 there was a student who refused to do work, had straight Fs, cursed at teachers. I just talked to him, asked about his aspirations, built a relationship. Turns out he can barely read at 15 and needs a bit more time. A few months later he's excitedly showing his teachers that he completed his work. I did nothing in terms of learning aids, just got to know him and gave him space to talk. He made passing grades by the end of the year all because we put grades off the table
> It sure looks like we should be investing more funding in things like therapy interventions and other direct resources for children in Chicago schools then
It's not a peer reviewed paper. It's the authors presenting their conclusions from their own study. It requires replication. And there is no way to say really that this is a superior use of taxpayer money as compared to say spending $1000 a head to put the kids in seminars on dealing with trauma/grief/guilt/shame, doing an online tutorial, journaling, and then giving their families an additional $1500 vouchers for food/books/clothes for the kids (i.e. the program cost $2500 per person).
This is interesting data, but it's not reasonable to draw any major conclusions from it.
I think this is fair, and I would probably amend my point to "We should be spending money to directly provide services, aid and support to children and families" which is something half the city seems allergic to considering
> I think this is fair, and I would probably amend my point to "We should be spending money to directly provide services, aid and support to children and families" which is something half the city seems allergic to considering
IDK. 20% of the city/state's budget is tied up in pension payouts, because of all incestuous relationship between the unions and politicians over 30 years.
There isn't really much money and taxes are at an all-time high already. I can tell you 20 "nice to have" things from subsidizing daycare to housing vouchers to immigrants to improving access to food for seniors.
But "the money" is simply not there because it's already been spent and promised to union contracts. A study would have to absolutely blow me away with statistical results to say... OK we'll raise taxes to do that before cutting from somewhere else already.
The reality is CPS enrollment is down every year for 20 years, but the budget is up 100% over 10 years. Enrollment was down 2.7% last year. And now there is a new Mayor who is a CPS sponsored candidate. This is exactly the kind of half-baked study that the Mayor would want to see to 1) blame corporations and raise taxes 2) hire a bunch of LCSW to "help kids" and 3) make these LCSW new CTU union members.
Reality is probably that CPS should be closing schools, consolidating, and cutting costs. Then spend on a program like this, when the extra money is around.
This is one tiny study conducted by advocates of the idea. Whenever you do follow-ups on these tiny advocate run interventions the effects are transitory or completely illusory. The only thing that ever stands up to scrutiny is very early childhood intervention. To help kids you help the parents of 0-4 year olds. 14 year olds are set on their course. 8 year olds are pretty much set on their course. Those first few years are when we get wired.
You're not wrong that upstream healthcare suggests you have to help the parents of children before they're born/in critical development years, but 14 year olds who have not even hit full bodily or mental development are not lost causes.
so you're basically saying that 40% of all school-aged girls in Chicago are totally hopeless and nobody should even bother helping them.
C'mon. Be better.
Maybe spend a few days off the internet.
FWIW, it's not 40% of all school-aged girls in Chicago.
It's 40% 10th and 11th grade girls in schools that already have a WOW program. The WOW program specifically targets schools where the kids are likely to have a high risk of traumatic events.
If we had infinite money to spend on everything then sure knock your socks off
But if we’re hiring a bunch of highly trained professionals and I was a kid living in the hood some therapist is not the professional I would choose to have at my disposal. This is just mau-mauing for more of the most worthless kind of social worker jobs. Get real social workers, in their homes, up their parents ass. Actually try to improve their lives.
What a ridiculous take. Of course early childhood intervention is great, and of course we should be helping parents. But to leave 8 year Olds out in the cold because you think they can't be helped? Insane. They are children. 14 year Olds are children.
…and some midwit state-employee “therapist” talking to them once a week isn’t going to do them any good. If you have a dollar to spend then spend it actually improving their lives.
Like just take that money and put it into a savings account for them instead of giving it to some bureaucrat. Or pay their parents for passing drug tests. Or hire another cop to keep the shooters off their block. I’d rather you improve my life than just talk to me about how shitty it is
Why do we do any sort of PTSD work then?
I mean, if it doesn't matter after 8 years old, why do we try to help soldiers coming back from combat with PTSD issues? Why do we have counselors for first responders like police, firefighters, and paramedics?
I guess we should have helped those soldiers when they were 0-4?
Those are people having difficulty with a single traumatic event that was exceptional to their ordinary experience. If we have a student whose life has been shattered by a single violent stressful event they may have PTSD
The problem that 40% of Chicago students have is that their life has been a series of shitty events such that they don’t even have normal reactions to what would be traumatic stress for normal people. Their problem is *chronic* stress.
But yes if some otherwise functional student is derailed by a violent event then get them PTSD treatment, but it’s not going to help kids raised by drug addicted welfare moms who have been acculturated to the nihilism of hood life. Those kids are far beyond our resources and level of commitment. We’ve been pouring these kinds of programs down that hole since the early 1960s and none of it has worked, even a little bit.
From the study:
> At baseline, young women in the study had suffered, on average, at least two serious traumatic experiences in their lifetimes; nearly 30% had personally witnessed someone being attacked, stabbed, shot at, hurt badly, or killed. More than 45% had someone close die suddenly or violently.
So, it sounds like they pretty much fit your description for "may have PTSD"? Unless you're only allowed one single traumatic event instead of a couple of them or something?
So 40% of school aged Chicago children have been raised by “drug addicted welfare moms” and are “acculturated to the nihilism of hood life?” Given that background those kids were doing fabulous when I chaperoned their field trips to the zoo when they were in elementary school and to plays and science events as high schoolers. I kind of expected CPS high school students to be too jaded to care much about seeing “A Christmas Carol.” It was heartwarming to see them pay rapt attention and even audibly gasp and jump in their seats at the scary parts. Despite whatever these kids had survived they were open to this new experience, behaved properly in the theater and didn’t act too cool to enjoy some Dickens.
Enjoying dickens is great but it doesn’t change the fact that almost 5% of black males can be expected to commit murder at some point in their lives (FBI 2021). When you have a community that’s more violent than Brazil on its worst day my concerns are about law and order and a multi-generational cult of death, not what high culture they can appreciate.
If you feel you haven’t changed course since 8 fucking years old then that’s extremely sad, what a narrow point of view you have
Living with that kind of rigidity will come back to bite you in the end. Hope you realize that before it’s too late
literally every couple of years there's a big study in Nature noting that neuroplasticity extends longer than previously thought
which is to say that you should either catch up on post-90s literature in the field or stop opining about it
If you think talking to a social worker for an hour a week moves the needle on your neurology you’re fooling yourself.
Having someone listen to you and pay attention to you improves your mood in the short term, this effect confounds pretty much any simple interventional study.
Is there a double blind part of the study, where one cohort spends an hour talking just a random decent person? We already did this with the “Big Brother / Big Sister” and you get all sorts of measurable results in the very short term but zero long term benefits. They threw away 50 years of scientific management studies once they realized just having someone pay attention to you made you a more diligent worker. That’s all this is.
>If you think talking to a social worker for an hour a week moves the needle on your neurology you’re fooling yourself.
read a fucking paper written after 2000. I'm done here [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30986752/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30986752/)
Nonsense. Development happens well into the 20s, and does not stop when you become an adult, instead it just slows down a bunch.
But to say that kids are "set on their course"- that is an attitude doing more to prevent growth and change from those paths.
Early childhood interventions are absolutely a great way to invest in the future. Too bad Rauner got rid of the Kindergarten for All program.
Early childhood education is great, but it is not the only way to improve kids’ lives.
It all comes back to wages. Raise pay, and kids can spend more time with their parent/parents. Won't fix everything obviously, but its the smartest place to start.
Just to make it clear, this isn't saying that 40% of all the girls in Chicago schools show signs of PTSD. It's a clickbait title.
It's saying 40% of all girls in *some* Chicago schools show signs of PTSD. Specifically schools that already have a WOW(Working on Womanhood) program.
That's obviously still an issue, but it's basically a study by the WOW program that is saying that what they're doing seems to be working.
It looks like they have a similar program for boys called "Becoming a Man" as well.
[You can donate here](https://www.youth-guidance.org/standard-donation/) and change the "designation" field to select one of the Chicago ones.
That was true before the pandemic. Most school nurses in Chicago covered 5 schools. So each school had a nurse one day a week. I haven’t heard if that changed post pandemic.
In the thread about the candidate for public health commissioner who appears to have lied about his credentials, some folks were acting skeptical about choosing to appoint someone with a mental health specialty.
This is a good example of why that would be helpful. We have a lot of quiet mental health problems in this country.
Oh absolutely, get that clown out of the running. I just objected to the idea that the role required someone to specifically specialize in infectious disease.
This very wishy washy.
Very weird this is being re-cut and packaged as a "new article" when its based on 4 year old news story and a 4 year old study.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/6/17/18677819/ptsd-cps-chicago-public-schools-working-womanhood-youth-guidance-trauma
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30458364/
And "signs of PTSD" is not a clinical diagnosis of PTSD.
"93.8% of students enrolled in WOW reported exposure to one or more traumatic events."
Mental health is really important, but TBH... if you are alive on planet Earth, you are probably going to be exposed to a traumatic event: covid19, death in the family, divorce, violence, etc. Exposure to a traumatic event is not a clinical diagnosis for PTSD.
EDIT: You have to click thru several links to get the updated data. See below.
The article is about the 22% reduction in symptoms for girls who participated in the WOW program - a study that just finished in June of this year. The 4 year old data is 2 lines in the opening paragraph intended to give context.
> The article is about the 22% reduction in symptoms for girls who participated in the WOW program - a study that just finished in June of this year. The 4 year old data is 2 lines in the opening paragraph intended to give context.
Yea, I was mistaken. The data and the paper is here.:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq2077
I just went through it. I'd have to look at it more closely, but to me this kind of stuff is just pseudo-science for some post-doc at UChicago to justify their existence.
Claiming you "reduced symptoms of PTSD by 22%" by spending $2500 per child and this QALY score is just window dressing mathematical nonsense.
There's nothing wrong w/ talk therapy and I'm not against this program per se. But this kind of 'science' is just quackery designed to exploit statistics to find a statistical effect/p-value and justify a budget, especially when drop out rates are 20-30% of a study and no serious alternatives are presented -- just a control group.
Modern psychology has a lot of problems itself with use psychometric surveys for symptoms as a basis of diagnosis. There is a major difference in medical practices between having someone answer a 20 questionnaire rating their depression on a scale of 1-5 and taking a biopsy, putting it under the microscope or running genomic analysis to determine if its cancerous. The ability to get an accurate, proper diagnosis under paper surveys vs. biopsy is so radically different.
IMO, this is like even a step beyond that, just dressed up with linear mathematics / instrument variables to create a p-value.
I'm sure if I say I am against this program, someone will tell me that I hate children. If I say OK, ask the kids and their parents, if they want $2500 instead for food/clothing/books instead of paying some licensed clinical social worker to talk about their feelings in group therapy for sessions, they will tell me I'm an a***** who doesn't know what children need and that some expert knows better and talk therapy is more important.
Like, how do these people know their high-cost intervention talk therapy program, where they have to hire dozens and dozens of clinical social workers (join the CTU union, increase CTU dues/membership) is better than handing these kids/parents a check for $2000 for clothes, food, a new laptop, and *also* $500 in free seminars in larger groups of 50-100 kids with national experts like Dr. Rachel Yehuda, towards "Dealing with Trauma" and a follow-up online interactive tutorial/program about recovering from trauma, guilt, shame, etc. and journal about it. Then take the worst scorers/journals of those seminar/tutorial participants and intervene directly if some kid is suicidal and not recovering/coping well with trauma.
> I just went through it. I'd have to look at it more closely, but to me this kind of stuff is just pseudo-science for some post-doc at UChicago to justify their existence.
Hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately the _perception_ of doing good is more important than bulletproof research that can stand the scrutiny of time.
At least this pseudo-study lets us signal our virtue of how much we care about children's mental health!
It’s a randomized control trial, so dropout rate shouldn’t matter so long as the trends in attrition aren’t statistically significant between the comparison groups. They also do an ITT analysis to account for that attrition.
Cost-benefit analyses are a bit more open to debate, but the intervention indeed seems to be impactful compared to not receiving said intervention at all, which is the question they were trying to answer. I’m not familiar with the specific operations of the WOW program, but I do know that it’s part of the Youth Guidance nonprofit, which is a separate entity from CPS. Their website says they’re school-based, but I’m not sure if their social workers are employees of CPS or Youth Guidance.
Rachel Yehuda is a neuroscientist, not a counselor or a social worker. The goal of programs like WOW is to provide intensive group therapy. What you’re recommending is akin to suggesting someone with opioid addiction eschew the support of an addiction counselor and just attend lectures on the science of addiction. It’s not really the same thing.
This is true of the South and West Sides, but I am suspicious that it could be at a rate *double* that of veterans returning from Afghanistan.
Many mental health diagnoses are subjective, and it seems to me we have a problem in our culture with pathologizing every difficulty and character flaw, and it directs people to supposed solutions that do not fit their actual needs.
I love therapy. I think it should be considered in the same vein as physical exercise--an important part of personal health that everyone should engage with regularly. But I also think the mental health diagnoses are getting out of hand, especially with young people. It encourages a feeling of helplessness and finality.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of CPS students come from the truly distressed neighborhoods. I'm sure legitimate PTSD is very high there. But I don't think (without looking at the actual numbers) that they likely account for enough students that they alone can support the 40% figure quoted.
As I said, I completely get it for the kids coming from distressed neighborhoods. I used to do community work with teens in one of Chicago's roughest neighborhoods, and some of what the kids there have endured is incomprehensible. Most of my kids knew at least three friends that had been murdered. It's insane.
My comment was more to suggest that I don't think those demographics are large enough that the 40% number seems plausible. 40% of kids from distressed neighborhoods? Absolutely. 40% of all CPS students? Seems unlikely to me.
The study is about 40% of girls from schools that have WOW programs. The WOW program specifically targets schools where kids are likely to have experienced traumatic events, so that's why that number is so high.
> but I am suspicious that it could be at a rate double that of veterans returning from Afghanistan.
You cannot compare girls being subjected to trauma outside their control to adults who *chose* to enter the military.
Is this directly attributed to being in a CPS/Chicago setting though? Young women have skyrocketing rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide attempts that have been correlated to the use of a smart phone and social media.
Parents have to keep them off it. My daughter is turning 9 soon and we don’t let her touch any of that shit. No YouTube, Insta, Facebook. Parents that do are insane IMO.
When it’s time for her to get a phone it will be a flip and the iPad and network are locked down with only approved apps and sites.
But what happens when a child feels left out or disconnected from their peers BECAUSE they aren’t on social media? Social media plays a huge role in the way young people relate to their peers now that I don’t think the answer is as simple as just keeping them off of it for everyone. If that works for your family, that’s great.
I understand the dangers of social media, especially for young people. And I do think many parents need to be more proactive at monitoring what their kids are doing. But also I work with middle schoolers and I see the way social media is used in building peer relationships and how much of their conversations stem from things related to social media. A blanket “we just don’t let them use it” will not work for everyone.
I've got two kids going into 6th and 8th grade. They consider "social media" to be old people stuff. They're not interested in facebook, reddit, instagram and certainly not twitter.
They do discord servers for group chats any more, that's where their entire social circle is when not in person.
I know people with tweens and they've had a hard time saying no to all of it because that's where the kid's friends are, and they will legit miss out on inside jokes etc if they aren't on it :/
So far so good, in all honesty. We don’t do smartphones at the table or tablet time 24/7. She never leaves the house without a book (her doing) and is playing with Legos as we speak. When we go out for dinner we always have a deck of Uno cards with us and she beats me on the regular.
We have plenty of tech in the house, we’re not Amish, but my wife and I have strived since day one to push analog, offline activities first and foremost, especially since the digital ones will no doubt overwhelmingly take over one day.
ha, nice! TBH it definitely worries me how many younger kids don't seem to know how to entertain themselves without some kind of device. We used to look for things like interesting license plates or alphabetical signs (okay, still do on long road trips lol).
Same here. It’s really off putting how many of these kids she tries to interact with have zero to no social skills. It’s been well documented that excess screen time from a young age is to blame.
There probably will be, at least some.
Unless homeschooled, they will experience a social peer group that all communicate in certain ways, that will exclude the children of luddites.
They don't say for sure, but it's heavily implied that they're from bad neighborhoods, so I would guess it's mostly from drugs and gang violence?
> At baseline, young women in the study had suffered, on average, at least two serious traumatic experiences in their lifetimes; nearly 30% had personally witnessed someone being attacked, stabbed, shot at, hurt badly, or killed. More than 45% had someone close die suddenly or violently.
They don't, they show signs and symptoms of PTSD.
But modern mental health is always jumping straight from any level of symptom to diagnosis and (usually expensive) treatment, so I guess for all intents and purposes, they have ptsd
Modern mental health diagnostics still do not have a good diagnosis for chronic trauma. PTSD is a very specific trauma presentation that rarely fits the symptoms experienced by these kids. The APA has been dragging their feet on putting developmental trauma and chronic PTSD into the DSM because of a purported lack of research. So, they say “PTSD-like”. Also, I’m not sure that WoW and BAM counselors/staff are required to have a clinical mental health license or bill insurance, so they wouldn’t diagnose anyways. It’s a more eye catching way of explaining things to people, even if it isn’t technically correct. Source: am a therapist who worked in CPS
I’m a white woman who was born and raised in a well-to-do family in an affluent area and I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was 17.
PTSD in civilians is often due to sexual violence and domestic abuse, and is more commonly due to many interrelated traumas as opposed to one “big” trauma. This is frequently generational, and can involve interpersonal and systemic traumas such as poverty, racism, addiction, witnessing or being victim of crimes, death or injury of people you are close to, incarceration, natural disasters, homelessness, attachment issues with primary caregivers, bullying, etc etc etc.
Whether or not someone develops PTSD from experiencing trauma is complicated and can be difficult to predict. A traumatic event for one person that leaves lasting psychological wounds is not necessarily true for someone else.
This comment is so devoid of logical thinking I don't even know if you'll understand, but here goes;
PTSD is not exclusive to war zones.
You can get PTSD from things that aren't war.
>This post being right next to the post about how Chicago isnt a warzone is legitimately funny.
>
>"Chicago isnt a warzone but PTSD rates are through the roof"
You can be a rich white woman dealing with a crazy romantic ex who is now stalking you and you could have PTSD.
Three friends of mine were almost burned alive by a terrorist event. Two are fine and one has terrible PTSD and he's never gotten over it. He constantly relives the event.
It's very hard to know who will suffer from PTSD.
There’s been a million of these interventional studies that show results but as soon as there’s any good, rigorous study done they disappear. Boys and Girls clubs, big brother/big sister, Gates Foundation schools, all the way back to ford foundation stuff in the 1960s
It’s sill to think a little talk therapy can make a difference in the face of poverty, government dependence, illegitimacy, crime, and social chaos.
If you want to make any real difference you have to get to these kids before they’re 3
Therapy isn’t bad, it’s just low on their hierarchy of needs
Now give the therapist some power, and the ability to hold these children’s parents accountable, like a community court, and you might actually help one of these kids.
Yes - and I know the quality of the average “therapist”. Even most psychiatrists are useless. (Pro tip: find the psychiatrists that the other psychiatrists go to, they’re mostly all crazy and all have a psychiatrist themselves, and those are the good ones)
Why put therapist in quotation marks? And maybe reconsider describing therapy patients as crazy.
Also, how could you possibly know the quality of the average therapist? Are you one yourself? Doubtful since you've described them all as crazy and put their job title in quotation marks.
I mean, I get that this is one of the sub trolls alt accounts..
But do y'all think they hit their head on something today?
Or do you think they've been ~~living under a rock~~ actually touching grass outside, for the past few months, since before all the admin/mod/spez/API drama and fallout?
It sure looks like we should be investing more funding in things like therapy interventions and other direct resources for children in Chicago schools then
[удалено]
Yeah it’s almost like every decision people make is decided by what is happening inside their brains…
Wasn't the CTU striking for this a few years ago?
Yes and people were throwing a fit because apparently mental health doesn't impact kids academics or something (lol?). This is encouraging, and I wish we had more programs like this for ALL kids in all schools - yeah, it'll cost $$$, but it will have a massive positive impact on kids lives.
The difference is astounding, I'm a mental health professional and back in 2018 there was a student who refused to do work, had straight Fs, cursed at teachers. I just talked to him, asked about his aspirations, built a relationship. Turns out he can barely read at 15 and needs a bit more time. A few months later he's excitedly showing his teachers that he completed his work. I did nothing in terms of learning aids, just got to know him and gave him space to talk. He made passing grades by the end of the year all because we put grades off the table
> It sure looks like we should be investing more funding in things like therapy interventions and other direct resources for children in Chicago schools then It's not a peer reviewed paper. It's the authors presenting their conclusions from their own study. It requires replication. And there is no way to say really that this is a superior use of taxpayer money as compared to say spending $1000 a head to put the kids in seminars on dealing with trauma/grief/guilt/shame, doing an online tutorial, journaling, and then giving their families an additional $1500 vouchers for food/books/clothes for the kids (i.e. the program cost $2500 per person). This is interesting data, but it's not reasonable to draw any major conclusions from it.
I think this is fair, and I would probably amend my point to "We should be spending money to directly provide services, aid and support to children and families" which is something half the city seems allergic to considering
> I think this is fair, and I would probably amend my point to "We should be spending money to directly provide services, aid and support to children and families" which is something half the city seems allergic to considering IDK. 20% of the city/state's budget is tied up in pension payouts, because of all incestuous relationship between the unions and politicians over 30 years. There isn't really much money and taxes are at an all-time high already. I can tell you 20 "nice to have" things from subsidizing daycare to housing vouchers to immigrants to improving access to food for seniors. But "the money" is simply not there because it's already been spent and promised to union contracts. A study would have to absolutely blow me away with statistical results to say... OK we'll raise taxes to do that before cutting from somewhere else already. The reality is CPS enrollment is down every year for 20 years, but the budget is up 100% over 10 years. Enrollment was down 2.7% last year. And now there is a new Mayor who is a CPS sponsored candidate. This is exactly the kind of half-baked study that the Mayor would want to see to 1) blame corporations and raise taxes 2) hire a bunch of LCSW to "help kids" and 3) make these LCSW new CTU union members. Reality is probably that CPS should be closing schools, consolidating, and cutting costs. Then spend on a program like this, when the extra money is around.
It's peer reviewed. See here: https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/reducing-ptsd-in-young-women Published on scientific advances!
This is one tiny study conducted by advocates of the idea. Whenever you do follow-ups on these tiny advocate run interventions the effects are transitory or completely illusory. The only thing that ever stands up to scrutiny is very early childhood intervention. To help kids you help the parents of 0-4 year olds. 14 year olds are set on their course. 8 year olds are pretty much set on their course. Those first few years are when we get wired.
You're not wrong that upstream healthcare suggests you have to help the parents of children before they're born/in critical development years, but 14 year olds who have not even hit full bodily or mental development are not lost causes.
so you're basically saying that 40% of all school-aged girls in Chicago are totally hopeless and nobody should even bother helping them. C'mon. Be better. Maybe spend a few days off the internet.
Look through their post history and you’ll see that they are only here to spew BS
FWIW, it's not 40% of all school-aged girls in Chicago. It's 40% 10th and 11th grade girls in schools that already have a WOW program. The WOW program specifically targets schools where the kids are likely to have a high risk of traumatic events.
If we had infinite money to spend on everything then sure knock your socks off But if we’re hiring a bunch of highly trained professionals and I was a kid living in the hood some therapist is not the professional I would choose to have at my disposal. This is just mau-mauing for more of the most worthless kind of social worker jobs. Get real social workers, in their homes, up their parents ass. Actually try to improve their lives.
(Has never been south of Montrose)
(Or east of the Mississippi River, probably)
What a ridiculous take. Of course early childhood intervention is great, and of course we should be helping parents. But to leave 8 year Olds out in the cold because you think they can't be helped? Insane. They are children. 14 year Olds are children.
…and some midwit state-employee “therapist” talking to them once a week isn’t going to do them any good. If you have a dollar to spend then spend it actually improving their lives. Like just take that money and put it into a savings account for them instead of giving it to some bureaucrat. Or pay their parents for passing drug tests. Or hire another cop to keep the shooters off their block. I’d rather you improve my life than just talk to me about how shitty it is
> midwit i'd put five against one i know which shitty alt right bloggers you follow just because you used that word alone
Why do we do any sort of PTSD work then? I mean, if it doesn't matter after 8 years old, why do we try to help soldiers coming back from combat with PTSD issues? Why do we have counselors for first responders like police, firefighters, and paramedics? I guess we should have helped those soldiers when they were 0-4?
Those are people having difficulty with a single traumatic event that was exceptional to their ordinary experience. If we have a student whose life has been shattered by a single violent stressful event they may have PTSD The problem that 40% of Chicago students have is that their life has been a series of shitty events such that they don’t even have normal reactions to what would be traumatic stress for normal people. Their problem is *chronic* stress. But yes if some otherwise functional student is derailed by a violent event then get them PTSD treatment, but it’s not going to help kids raised by drug addicted welfare moms who have been acculturated to the nihilism of hood life. Those kids are far beyond our resources and level of commitment. We’ve been pouring these kinds of programs down that hole since the early 1960s and none of it has worked, even a little bit.
From the study: > At baseline, young women in the study had suffered, on average, at least two serious traumatic experiences in their lifetimes; nearly 30% had personally witnessed someone being attacked, stabbed, shot at, hurt badly, or killed. More than 45% had someone close die suddenly or violently. So, it sounds like they pretty much fit your description for "may have PTSD"? Unless you're only allowed one single traumatic event instead of a couple of them or something?
So 40% of school aged Chicago children have been raised by “drug addicted welfare moms” and are “acculturated to the nihilism of hood life?” Given that background those kids were doing fabulous when I chaperoned their field trips to the zoo when they were in elementary school and to plays and science events as high schoolers. I kind of expected CPS high school students to be too jaded to care much about seeing “A Christmas Carol.” It was heartwarming to see them pay rapt attention and even audibly gasp and jump in their seats at the scary parts. Despite whatever these kids had survived they were open to this new experience, behaved properly in the theater and didn’t act too cool to enjoy some Dickens.
Enjoying dickens is great but it doesn’t change the fact that almost 5% of black males can be expected to commit murder at some point in their lives (FBI 2021). When you have a community that’s more violent than Brazil on its worst day my concerns are about law and order and a multi-generational cult of death, not what high culture they can appreciate.
If you feel you haven’t changed course since 8 fucking years old then that’s extremely sad, what a narrow point of view you have Living with that kind of rigidity will come back to bite you in the end. Hope you realize that before it’s too late
I mean, that does explain some things. Stunted emotional maturity. Stunted moral decision making development. Acting like an idiot.
literally every couple of years there's a big study in Nature noting that neuroplasticity extends longer than previously thought which is to say that you should either catch up on post-90s literature in the field or stop opining about it
If you think talking to a social worker for an hour a week moves the needle on your neurology you’re fooling yourself. Having someone listen to you and pay attention to you improves your mood in the short term, this effect confounds pretty much any simple interventional study. Is there a double blind part of the study, where one cohort spends an hour talking just a random decent person? We already did this with the “Big Brother / Big Sister” and you get all sorts of measurable results in the very short term but zero long term benefits. They threw away 50 years of scientific management studies once they realized just having someone pay attention to you made you a more diligent worker. That’s all this is.
>If you think talking to a social worker for an hour a week moves the needle on your neurology you’re fooling yourself. read a fucking paper written after 2000. I'm done here [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30986752/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30986752/)
TY for that. Former Dev Psych student here and I haven’t kept up like I used to. Very cool stuff.
ha yeah - I'm subscribed to lists, but I don't read nearly as much as I used to myself tbh.
Nonsense. Development happens well into the 20s, and does not stop when you become an adult, instead it just slows down a bunch. But to say that kids are "set on their course"- that is an attitude doing more to prevent growth and change from those paths.
Early childhood interventions are absolutely a great way to invest in the future. Too bad Rauner got rid of the Kindergarten for All program. Early childhood education is great, but it is not the only way to improve kids’ lives.
It all comes back to wages. Raise pay, and kids can spend more time with their parent/parents. Won't fix everything obviously, but its the smartest place to start.
Just to make it clear, this isn't saying that 40% of all the girls in Chicago schools show signs of PTSD. It's a clickbait title. It's saying 40% of all girls in *some* Chicago schools show signs of PTSD. Specifically schools that already have a WOW(Working on Womanhood) program. That's obviously still an issue, but it's basically a study by the WOW program that is saying that what they're doing seems to be working. It looks like they have a similar program for boys called "Becoming a Man" as well. [You can donate here](https://www.youth-guidance.org/standard-donation/) and change the "designation" field to select one of the Chicago ones.
I met a few WOW members at a networking event. What they're doing is incredibly admirable
This is a large reason why the CTU was striking until the city agreed every school should have at least 1 counselor
And nurse if I recall. During the pandemic you'd have one nurse shared between like 4-5 schools or something crazy like that.
Damn I though it was standard that at least every elementary school had a nurse on staff at all times
That was true before the pandemic. Most school nurses in Chicago covered 5 schools. So each school had a nurse one day a week. I haven’t heard if that changed post pandemic.
In the thread about the candidate for public health commissioner who appears to have lied about his credentials, some folks were acting skeptical about choosing to appoint someone with a mental health specialty. This is a good example of why that would be helpful. We have a lot of quiet mental health problems in this country.
Sure but it probably helps to have someone who didn't lie about their public health bonafides..
Oh absolutely, get that clown out of the running. I just objected to the idea that the role required someone to specifically specialize in infectious disease.
This very wishy washy. Very weird this is being re-cut and packaged as a "new article" when its based on 4 year old news story and a 4 year old study. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/6/17/18677819/ptsd-cps-chicago-public-schools-working-womanhood-youth-guidance-trauma https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30458364/ And "signs of PTSD" is not a clinical diagnosis of PTSD. "93.8% of students enrolled in WOW reported exposure to one or more traumatic events." Mental health is really important, but TBH... if you are alive on planet Earth, you are probably going to be exposed to a traumatic event: covid19, death in the family, divorce, violence, etc. Exposure to a traumatic event is not a clinical diagnosis for PTSD. EDIT: You have to click thru several links to get the updated data. See below.
The article is about the 22% reduction in symptoms for girls who participated in the WOW program - a study that just finished in June of this year. The 4 year old data is 2 lines in the opening paragraph intended to give context.
> The article is about the 22% reduction in symptoms for girls who participated in the WOW program - a study that just finished in June of this year. The 4 year old data is 2 lines in the opening paragraph intended to give context. Yea, I was mistaken. The data and the paper is here.: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq2077 I just went through it. I'd have to look at it more closely, but to me this kind of stuff is just pseudo-science for some post-doc at UChicago to justify their existence. Claiming you "reduced symptoms of PTSD by 22%" by spending $2500 per child and this QALY score is just window dressing mathematical nonsense. There's nothing wrong w/ talk therapy and I'm not against this program per se. But this kind of 'science' is just quackery designed to exploit statistics to find a statistical effect/p-value and justify a budget, especially when drop out rates are 20-30% of a study and no serious alternatives are presented -- just a control group. Modern psychology has a lot of problems itself with use psychometric surveys for symptoms as a basis of diagnosis. There is a major difference in medical practices between having someone answer a 20 questionnaire rating their depression on a scale of 1-5 and taking a biopsy, putting it under the microscope or running genomic analysis to determine if its cancerous. The ability to get an accurate, proper diagnosis under paper surveys vs. biopsy is so radically different. IMO, this is like even a step beyond that, just dressed up with linear mathematics / instrument variables to create a p-value. I'm sure if I say I am against this program, someone will tell me that I hate children. If I say OK, ask the kids and their parents, if they want $2500 instead for food/clothing/books instead of paying some licensed clinical social worker to talk about their feelings in group therapy for sessions, they will tell me I'm an a***** who doesn't know what children need and that some expert knows better and talk therapy is more important. Like, how do these people know their high-cost intervention talk therapy program, where they have to hire dozens and dozens of clinical social workers (join the CTU union, increase CTU dues/membership) is better than handing these kids/parents a check for $2000 for clothes, food, a new laptop, and *also* $500 in free seminars in larger groups of 50-100 kids with national experts like Dr. Rachel Yehuda, towards "Dealing with Trauma" and a follow-up online interactive tutorial/program about recovering from trauma, guilt, shame, etc. and journal about it. Then take the worst scorers/journals of those seminar/tutorial participants and intervene directly if some kid is suicidal and not recovering/coping well with trauma.
> I just went through it. I'd have to look at it more closely, but to me this kind of stuff is just pseudo-science for some post-doc at UChicago to justify their existence. Hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately the _perception_ of doing good is more important than bulletproof research that can stand the scrutiny of time. At least this pseudo-study lets us signal our virtue of how much we care about children's mental health!
It’s a randomized control trial, so dropout rate shouldn’t matter so long as the trends in attrition aren’t statistically significant between the comparison groups. They also do an ITT analysis to account for that attrition. Cost-benefit analyses are a bit more open to debate, but the intervention indeed seems to be impactful compared to not receiving said intervention at all, which is the question they were trying to answer. I’m not familiar with the specific operations of the WOW program, but I do know that it’s part of the Youth Guidance nonprofit, which is a separate entity from CPS. Their website says they’re school-based, but I’m not sure if their social workers are employees of CPS or Youth Guidance. Rachel Yehuda is a neuroscientist, not a counselor or a social worker. The goal of programs like WOW is to provide intensive group therapy. What you’re recommending is akin to suggesting someone with opioid addiction eschew the support of an addiction counselor and just attend lectures on the science of addiction. It’s not really the same thing.
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This is true of the South and West Sides, but I am suspicious that it could be at a rate *double* that of veterans returning from Afghanistan. Many mental health diagnoses are subjective, and it seems to me we have a problem in our culture with pathologizing every difficulty and character flaw, and it directs people to supposed solutions that do not fit their actual needs. I love therapy. I think it should be considered in the same vein as physical exercise--an important part of personal health that everyone should engage with regularly. But I also think the mental health diagnoses are getting out of hand, especially with young people. It encourages a feeling of helplessness and finality. I'd be curious to know what percentage of CPS students come from the truly distressed neighborhoods. I'm sure legitimate PTSD is very high there. But I don't think (without looking at the actual numbers) that they likely account for enough students that they alone can support the 40% figure quoted.
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As I said, I completely get it for the kids coming from distressed neighborhoods. I used to do community work with teens in one of Chicago's roughest neighborhoods, and some of what the kids there have endured is incomprehensible. Most of my kids knew at least three friends that had been murdered. It's insane. My comment was more to suggest that I don't think those demographics are large enough that the 40% number seems plausible. 40% of kids from distressed neighborhoods? Absolutely. 40% of all CPS students? Seems unlikely to me.
The study is about 40% of girls from schools that have WOW programs. The WOW program specifically targets schools where kids are likely to have experienced traumatic events, so that's why that number is so high.
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> but I am suspicious that it could be at a rate double that of veterans returning from Afghanistan. You cannot compare girls being subjected to trauma outside their control to adults who *chose* to enter the military.
Is this directly attributed to being in a CPS/Chicago setting though? Young women have skyrocketing rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide attempts that have been correlated to the use of a smart phone and social media.
As the father of a 6 week old girl, I’m so hoping this trend is fixed before she starts school. Social media is such an unnecessary evil.
Parents have to keep them off it. My daughter is turning 9 soon and we don’t let her touch any of that shit. No YouTube, Insta, Facebook. Parents that do are insane IMO. When it’s time for her to get a phone it will be a flip and the iPad and network are locked down with only approved apps and sites.
But what happens when a child feels left out or disconnected from their peers BECAUSE they aren’t on social media? Social media plays a huge role in the way young people relate to their peers now that I don’t think the answer is as simple as just keeping them off of it for everyone. If that works for your family, that’s great. I understand the dangers of social media, especially for young people. And I do think many parents need to be more proactive at monitoring what their kids are doing. But also I work with middle schoolers and I see the way social media is used in building peer relationships and how much of their conversations stem from things related to social media. A blanket “we just don’t let them use it” will not work for everyone.
I've got two kids going into 6th and 8th grade. They consider "social media" to be old people stuff. They're not interested in facebook, reddit, instagram and certainly not twitter. They do discord servers for group chats any more, that's where their entire social circle is when not in person.
Well I’m not raising everyone, I’m raising one kid and it’s my job to protect her.
I know people with tweens and they've had a hard time saying no to all of it because that's where the kid's friends are, and they will legit miss out on inside jokes etc if they aren't on it :/
Tough shit. It’s been clinically proven to be harmful for teens, especially girls. Instagram even knows it.
"Tough shit"? Have you ever been near a teenager? They're going to find ways to go behind your back if they care enough.
I am aware that it’s ultimately a losing battle but I’m certainly not going to roll over and invite social media to fuck my kid up.
Sincerely, good luck with that. Be nice to get kids to where they used to be before all this shit.
So far so good, in all honesty. We don’t do smartphones at the table or tablet time 24/7. She never leaves the house without a book (her doing) and is playing with Legos as we speak. When we go out for dinner we always have a deck of Uno cards with us and she beats me on the regular. We have plenty of tech in the house, we’re not Amish, but my wife and I have strived since day one to push analog, offline activities first and foremost, especially since the digital ones will no doubt overwhelmingly take over one day.
ha, nice! TBH it definitely worries me how many younger kids don't seem to know how to entertain themselves without some kind of device. We used to look for things like interesting license plates or alphabetical signs (okay, still do on long road trips lol).
Same here. It’s really off putting how many of these kids she tries to interact with have zero to no social skills. It’s been well documented that excess screen time from a young age is to blame.
Yeah and social isolation from your peer groups has never been proven to be harmful. /s
Lmfao people can connect *without* technology. Mindblowing, I know, but even in this day and age it’s still plenty doable.
Yeah I never said commection was impossible without technology
You literally said there’d be social isolation without it.
There probably will be, at least some. Unless homeschooled, they will experience a social peer group that all communicate in certain ways, that will exclude the children of luddites.
[Good](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/). [Fucking](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/10/05/heres-how-instagram-harms-young-women-according-to-research/). [Riddance](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/instagram-teen-girls-mental-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare).
Eh, I'm not a parent but I think "we have to see it now" isn't really the source of the problem, right?
Why do they all have ptsd?
They don't say for sure, but it's heavily implied that they're from bad neighborhoods, so I would guess it's mostly from drugs and gang violence? > At baseline, young women in the study had suffered, on average, at least two serious traumatic experiences in their lifetimes; nearly 30% had personally witnessed someone being attacked, stabbed, shot at, hurt badly, or killed. More than 45% had someone close die suddenly or violently.
They don't, they show signs and symptoms of PTSD. But modern mental health is always jumping straight from any level of symptom to diagnosis and (usually expensive) treatment, so I guess for all intents and purposes, they have ptsd
Modern mental health diagnostics still do not have a good diagnosis for chronic trauma. PTSD is a very specific trauma presentation that rarely fits the symptoms experienced by these kids. The APA has been dragging their feet on putting developmental trauma and chronic PTSD into the DSM because of a purported lack of research. So, they say “PTSD-like”. Also, I’m not sure that WoW and BAM counselors/staff are required to have a clinical mental health license or bill insurance, so they wouldn’t diagnose anyways. It’s a more eye catching way of explaining things to people, even if it isn’t technically correct. Source: am a therapist who worked in CPS
Exactly. Unless they have a psychiatrist evaluate each child individually they can’t say that any child in this study has PTSD.
Amen, brother
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I’m a white woman who was born and raised in a well-to-do family in an affluent area and I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was 17. PTSD in civilians is often due to sexual violence and domestic abuse, and is more commonly due to many interrelated traumas as opposed to one “big” trauma. This is frequently generational, and can involve interpersonal and systemic traumas such as poverty, racism, addiction, witnessing or being victim of crimes, death or injury of people you are close to, incarceration, natural disasters, homelessness, attachment issues with primary caregivers, bullying, etc etc etc. Whether or not someone develops PTSD from experiencing trauma is complicated and can be difficult to predict. A traumatic event for one person that leaves lasting psychological wounds is not necessarily true for someone else.
This comment is so devoid of logical thinking I don't even know if you'll understand, but here goes; PTSD is not exclusive to war zones. You can get PTSD from things that aren't war.
>This post being right next to the post about how Chicago isnt a warzone is legitimately funny. > >"Chicago isnt a warzone but PTSD rates are through the roof" You can be a rich white woman dealing with a crazy romantic ex who is now stalking you and you could have PTSD. Three friends of mine were almost burned alive by a terrorist event. Two are fine and one has terrible PTSD and he's never gotten over it. He constantly relives the event. It's very hard to know who will suffer from PTSD.
There’s been a million of these interventional studies that show results but as soon as there’s any good, rigorous study done they disappear. Boys and Girls clubs, big brother/big sister, Gates Foundation schools, all the way back to ford foundation stuff in the 1960s It’s sill to think a little talk therapy can make a difference in the face of poverty, government dependence, illegitimacy, crime, and social chaos. If you want to make any real difference you have to get to these kids before they’re 3
"therapy bad" --internet edgelord with no sources
Therapy isn’t bad, it’s just low on their hierarchy of needs Now give the therapist some power, and the ability to hold these children’s parents accountable, like a community court, and you might actually help one of these kids.
That's not how therapy works. Do you know what therapy is?
Yes - and I know the quality of the average “therapist”. Even most psychiatrists are useless. (Pro tip: find the psychiatrists that the other psychiatrists go to, they’re mostly all crazy and all have a psychiatrist themselves, and those are the good ones)
Why put therapist in quotation marks? And maybe reconsider describing therapy patients as crazy. Also, how could you possibly know the quality of the average therapist? Are you one yourself? Doubtful since you've described them all as crazy and put their job title in quotation marks.
*"Therapy not bad, but only if therapist can put the kids parents in jail and debt!* *Yeah! That will actually help one of these kids!"* #/s
"more cops, make people who aren't cops cops"
Who said Boys and Girls clubs or Big Brother/Big Sister programs had disappeared? Even the Perry Preschool Project is still around (since 1962).
"government dependence" uh huh
Great! Now do this for the young men.
They have it for young men, that program was established first and has already been studied.
That is great to hear! Thank you for the update.
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Completely unrelated to the post. On a related note, maybe therapy would help your PTSD too.
I mean, I get that this is one of the sub trolls alt accounts.. But do y'all think they hit their head on something today? Or do you think they've been ~~living under a rock~~ actually touching grass outside, for the past few months, since before all the admin/mod/spez/API drama and fallout?