30/12/12 11:58 AM

Print Close Window

The post in post-traumatic stress

New York Times Posted online: Sun Dec 30 2012, 02:27 hrs

DAVID DOBBS
In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defined trauma as a recognisable stressor that
would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyoneuniversally toxic, like a poison. But it turns out that
most trauma victims rebound to live full, normal lives. That has given rise to a more nuanced view of traumaless a
poison than an infectious agent, a challenge that most people overcome but that may defeat those weakened by past
traumas, genetics or other factors.
The idea was demonstrated vividly in two presentations this fall at the University of California, Los Angeles, US. Each
described 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 one
of the most widely used models of how maternal separation affects young rats. The model was created in the early
1990s by Plotsky himself to bring consistency to the way maternal separation is studied. Earlier experiments kept
mother 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 while
conversing with them in gentle, ultrasonic warbles. After a 180-minute separation, however, most mothers would dash
about emitting panicky squeaks, often stomping on the pups or ignoring them. And for the rest of their lives, they had
outsize physiological and behavioural reactions to stress and challenge.
This 15/180 model quickly became a standard, generating scores of studies showing that long separations created
anxious 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 they
were taken from. So he upgraded the simple cage to a complex one. The separated rat family now reunited not in the
kidnapping 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 (or
even eight days in a row), she would do the same thing, usually choosing a new room. But maybe the pups still
suffered? Actually, no. Few showed any signs of trauma, either immediate or lasting. Trauma seemed now to rise not
from 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, Dr
Brandon Kohrt, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at George Washington University, has followed the fates of
Nepalese children who returned to their villages after serving with the Maoist rebels during their countrys civil war. All
141 in the study, five to 14 years old when they joined the rebels, experienced violence, aside from their separation
from family. Yet their postwar mental health depended not on their exposure to war but on how their families and
villages received them.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/1051913/

Page 1 of 2

30/12/12 11:58 AM

In villages where the children were stigmatised, they suffered high, persistent levels of post-traumatic stress disorder.
But in villages that readily and happily reintegrated them, they experienced no more mental distress than did peers
who had never gone to war. The lasting harm of being a child soldier, it seemed, arose not from the war but from
social isolation and conflict afterward.
So is the traumatic event more than just the event itselfthe event plus some crucial aspect of social environment that
has the potential to either dull or amplify its effects? Some scientists doubt that any such redefinition is in order. To
Plotsky, this new view strengthens the argument for social interventions that have been shown to ease the effects of
traumatic experiences.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/1051913/

Page 2 of 2