̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - trauma

US gun violence: half of people from Chicago witness a shooting by age 40, study suggests

fpjl2 — Tue, 09 May 2023 15:07:11 +0000

A study tracking the lives of Chicagoans from childhood and adolescence in the 1990s to the start of middle age has found that 56% of Black and Hispanic residents from across the city witnessed at least one shooting by the time they turned 40.

White residents were exposed to gun violence at less than half the rate of Black and Hispanic residents, although it was still high: 25% of White Chicagoans had witnessed a shooting before turning forty.

Across racial categories, 50% of all the study’s participants had been exposed to gun violence by age 40. ̽��ֱ��average age to witness a shooting was just 14 years old.

Of those in the study, more than 7% of Black and Hispanic people had themselves been shot before turning forty, compared to 3% of White people. ̽��ֱ��average age for being shot was 17 years old.

Researchers also compared the locations of gun violence incidents* in the year leading up to recent study interviews in 2021. Rates of shootings within a 250-metre radius of the homes of Black participants were over 12 times higher than those of White participants. Rates of shootings near the homes of Hispanic people were almost four times higher than for White people.

̽��ֱ��research team continued to gather data for participants who had moved out of the city, although the vast majority of gun violence took place within Chicago.

̽��ֱ��sustained stress of living with the potential for gun violence likely takes a “cumulative physiological toll” on Chicago’s citizens – and people in cities across the US, argue researchers.

Findings from the latest study, led by a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge criminologist in collaboration with researchers from Harvard and Oxford universities, are published in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association

“Existing evidence suggests that the long-term stress of exposure to firearm violence can contribute to everything from lower test scores for schoolkids to diminished life expectancy through heart disease,” said study lead author Dr Charles Lanfear, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“We expected levels of exposure to gun violence to be high, but not this high. Our findings are frankly startling and disturbing,” said Lanfear. “A substantial portion of Chicago’s population could be living with trauma as a result of witnessing shootings and homicides, often at a very young age.”

“It is clear that Black people in particular are often living in a very different social context, with far higher risks of seeing and becoming victims of gun violence in the streets near their homes lasting into middle age.”

̽��ֱ��Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a Harvard ̽��ֱ�� study, has followed thousands of children since they were first surveyed in the 1990s, gathering life experiences as they grow up in the city or move away. Participants are from households selected at random from a set list of eighty Chicago districts – carefully chosen to reflect Chicago’s spectrum of race and levels of social advantage, or lack thereof.

̽��ֱ��latest research focused on data gathered from 2,418 of participants born in the early 1980s through to the mid-1990s, equally split between men and women.**

̽��ֱ��oldest study participants, born in 1981, hit adolescence in the early-to-mid 1990s when lethal violence reached a peak in the US. “ ̽��ֱ��nineties saw a demographic bump collide with high poverty levels and rises in gang crime resulting in part from the crack epidemic,” said Lanfear.

“However, since 2016 we have seen another surge in gun violence. Rates of fatal shootings in Chicago are now higher than they ever were in the nineties.”

Men are far more likely to be involved in violent crime, and this is reflected in the risks of actually being shot by age 40, which are five times higher for men than women. However, there was a much smaller difference between the sexes for exposure to gun violence: 43% of women and 58% of men had seen someone shot.

“ ̽��ֱ��chronic stress effects on women from being so highly exposed to firearm violence may well be substantial in Chicago, and indeed in many US cities,” said Lanfear.

“ ̽��ֱ��study participants are taken from right across Chicago, and only a tiny fraction will be involved in any kind of crime. Given the levels of women and children witnessing gun violence in the city, the vast majority of this exposure will be as bystanders in public spaces, in streets or outside schools.”

“ ̽��ֱ��public health consequences of life in violent and traumatised neighbourhoods will be playing out not just in Chicago, but in many cities right across the United States,” Lanfear said.

Study following thousands of Chicagoans from across the city over a 25-year period found that 50% of the study participants had seen a shooting before middle age.

A substantial portion of Chicago’s population could be living with trauma as a result of witnessing shootings and homicides

Charles Lanfear

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Police line in Chicago, Illinois, USA

Notes

*Taken from the Gun Violence Archive, and not-for-profit organisation that collates data on gun violence drawn from sources including police departments, media and government agencies.
** Racial make-up of the study participants as follows: 890 Black respondents, 1146 Hispanic respondents, and 382 White respondents. ̽��ֱ��research looked at data from PHDCN study groups born in 1984, 1987 and 1996. ̽��ֱ��research team say they can safely estimate exposure to gun violence up to age 40 for the majority of the study participants. Even the younger group, now 27, are on track to compare with older cohorts, as most shootings are witnessed during youth.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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UK policing: psychological damage among officers heightened by bad working conditions

fpjl2 — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:50:23 +0000

High levels of trauma-related mental health disorders across UK police forces are partly the result of bad working conditions such as having too little time, sexual harassment, and dealing with difficult situations without support, according to a study led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

However, officers who say they feel supported by colleagues, and have a sense of doing meaningful work, had around half the rates of a form of PTSD as the national average for policing staff.

Researchers behind the study say their findings suggest that simple improvements to the working lives of police – scheduled time for support from peers and supervisors, for example – could dramatically reduce the level of psychiatric problems in UK forces.

Sociologists surveyed thousands of police personnel across the country in 2018 and found that 12% showed clinical symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), a chronic condition in which repeated trauma exposure causes social disconnection, feelings of worthlessness, and an inability to regulate emotions.

Complex PTSD often leads to 'burnout' and substance abuse. In fact, 90% of police workers in the original survey study ̽��ֱ��Job, ̽��ֱ��Life had experienced trauma, and one in five of these reported symptoms of either PTSD or C-PTSD.

Now, the same team of researchers have analysed survey data provided by 12,248 serving police officers to determine the working conditions and on-the-job situations with the strongest links to Complex PTSD. ̽��ֱ��latest findings are published in the journal Policing.

Trauma detailed by officers with probable levels of Complex PTSD based on the survey screening included dealing with fatal car accidents, rapes, homicides, suicides – including of children – and drug overdoses.

Exposure to physical violence made little difference to rates of C-PTSD, nor did long working hours.

However, officers who described it as “very difficult” to take time away from the job for personal or family matters had C-PTSD rates over 50% higher than the UK-wide average for police.

Those who described their relationship between work and personal life as “not fitting well at all”, some 15% of police officers in the study, had twice (24%) the average policing rates of C-PTSD.

One officer suffering with probable C-PTSD described how what you see “impacts on your life outside of work”, offering the example of cases involving dead children that “make you anxious about your own children's wellbeing. To a degree you lose your innocence.”

Another C-PTSD sufferer said “it is a given and accepted” that the job means exposure to trauma, and describes the occupational health team in their force as “brilliant” but few in number. “They are only able to put 'sticky plasters' on, and send the officers back out,” the officer said.

Police officers who described never having enough time to “get the job done” had almost double the rates of C-PTSD as the average across UK forces, 22% compared to 12%, as did officers who reported experiencing sexual harassment – whether from the public or colleagues.

Officers who said they could never rely on the help and support of colleagues were most likely to suffer with Complex PTSD, with over 43% displaying symptoms, but such claims were relatively rare.

One detective with C-PTSD symptoms recounted dealing with sexual abuse cases as the sole investigating officer. “Little or no support from management. Victims hanging all their hopes and pressures on me.”

By contrast, C-PTSD rates were just 7% among those who said they could always rely on colleagues, and just 6% among those who say they regularly get a feeling of a job well done, with researchers claiming that a sense of meaningful work may provide a 'protective effect' mentally.

“Our research shows that the debilitating psychological misery often caused by trauma exposure isn’t an inevitable part of the difficult job of policing, it is exacerbated by poor working conditions,” said Prof Brendan Burchell, lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology.

̽��ֱ��team also conducted analyses beyond individual officers to compare forces, revealing a strong link between “wor' intensity' – those forces with more officers reporting a lack of time to effectively police – and increased rates of Complex PTSD.

Of 18 anonymised UK police forces, the one with the highest reported time constraints among officers had C-PTSD rates of 29%, well over double the average for the overall policing population.

“Severe austerity cuts since 2010 leading to a marked reduction in police numbers without a decrease in the demands of the job inevitably creates more time pressure for remaining officers,” said Burchell.

“Single-crewing, shift work and fewer resources mean that time for encouraging words between colleagues or space for officers to acknowledge their traumatic experiences are few and far between.”

One officer with probable C-PTSD described being “single crewed” at a rural location for a year, with nearest support almost an hour away. Another spoke of going from a shift team of five to working alone. “My coping strategy of being around colleagues who had been to the same fatal accident or suicide was taken away from me.”

Cambridge co-author Dr Jessica Miller, who is also director of research for Police Care UK, the charity that funded the research, added: “ ̽��ֱ��police forces reporting the best working conditions had much lower rates of PTSD. Modest investments to improve their working conditions could see significant reductions in psychological problems among police officers.”

Nationwide study of over 12,000 officers suggests rates of trauma-induced disorder Complex PTSD are exacerbated by factors such as too little time and support, and lack of say over working hours.

̽��ֱ��debilitating psychological misery often caused by trauma exposure isn’t an inevitable part of the difficult job of policing

Brendan Burchell

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Opinion: ̽��ֱ��challenges faced by doctors and nurses in conflict zones

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:34:40 +0000

Quite aside from the deadly and disorienting consequences for Ukraine’s citizens, Russia’s invasion places unique pressure on its doctors and nurses.

Cardiac arrests, caesareans and appendectomies are now often accompanied by injuries that should be relatively rare: gunshot and shrapnel wounds, third-degree burns, double or triple amputations, loss of sight, brain and spinal cord injuries. Were chemical weapons to ever be deployed, one can add blistering, convulsions and muscle paralysis. Then there are decisions unimaginable to many of us but unavoidable when resources are scarce: who will live and who will not.

With advance notice, medical staff can stock up on vast blood supplies, platelet-rich plasma and refrigerators. They can hone the specialist skills required for resuscitating and then repairing what war destroys. During the long war in Afghanistan, for example, military medical staff from allied forces underwent rigorous training before deployment. British surgeons and anaesthetists were required to complete a five-day military operational surgical training course at the Royal College of Surgeons where they practised damage control surgery on human cadavers, deliberately “wounded” to mimic typical injuries sustained during war.

From London, they’d move to an old aeroplane hanger outside the ancient English cathedral city of York to reappear, as if by magic, in a replica of Camp Bastion field hospital in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Here, they relied on actual amputees and theatrical makeup artists to reenact the patient journey from a helicopter to an intensive care unit. Even the thumping of an approaching Chinook was played over the sound system as doctors and nurses rolled up their sleeves.

Given the speed at which the conflict is advancing, Ukraine’s doctors make do instead with a 12-hour online equivalent designed and run by Dr David Nott and Dr Henry Marsh. Nott has 30 years’ experience working in conflict and disaster zones as a general and vascular surgeon and, through his David Nott Foundation, offers lifesaving treatment for victims by better equipping local doctors who care for them.

Unseen injuries

Other challenges facing doctors and nurses are more subtle, longer lasting, and more personal. War can be deeply traumatising, even for doctors and nurses not in the line of fire, meaning that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are often as high for medical staff as for those at immediate risk of injury or death.

Until recently, the causes of PTSD were not well understood. We now know more about the extent to which cultural expectations, professional role identity, and organisational protocol (or formal rules) can exacerbate feelings of senselessness, futility, and surreality, and threaten people’s existential grounding.

This is because these contexts can trigger and amplify repeated experiences of senselessness (or the inability to justify war and its consequences), of futility (or the inability for medics to live up to their own expectations of “making a difference” as “compassion fatigue” sets in), and of surreality (or the inability to reconcile the absurdities of war with “life as normal”).

Senselessness, futility and surreality characterise the experience of war for many who are exposed to it. And when these experiences are sustained, they can dislocate a person’s sense of what they consider “meaningful”, “good” and “normal” to the point where they become an existential threat. They are war’s invisible injuries.

To compensate for this sense of dislocation, doctors and nurses have been observed to resort to innovative coping strategies. For example, they will refrain from publicly criticising the war effort for fear of hurting morale. They avoid emotional engagement by not attending funerals. They use humour to deflect and manage constant exposure to the cruelty of war. They establish enclaves of normality by importing home comforts (for example, in Camp Bastion, doctors organised Friday night pizzas and Sunday morning pancakes). They create improvised spaces in which to temporarily withdraw from war and catch up on Netflix. They grow flowers in the most uninhabitable spaces.

Sadly, the unintended consequence of this is often that it makes war even more surreal and cruel and the ability to help turn the tide more difficult.

Under circumstances such as those facing doctors and nurses in Ukraine today, the best prevention may be to accept that war is ugly, indiscriminate and savage. It is also a reminder of what is lost and what we must now work hard to preserve and repair.

This article is republished from ̽��ֱ��Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School outlines some of the unique pressures faced by doctors and nurses in Ukraine, in this piece originally published in ̽��ֱ��Conversation.

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine

Patient being treated in a Kharkiv hospital during a 2015 military operation

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Too big to cry: when war ended, the damage began

amb206 — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 10:00:00 +0000

When we think of the First World War, we remember the many millions of men who died. But, as dangerous it was to be a soldier in the horror of the trenches, it was more dangerous to be a baby back at home. This parlous state of affairs was described by the Bishop of London at the launch of an initiative called Baby Week designed to improve infant survival rates: “100,000 babies died during the first twelve months from their birth… While nine soldiers died every hour in 1915 twelve babies died each hour.”

This bleak picture, and the urgent efforts made to redress it, is one backdrop to ̽��ֱ��Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice a collection of essays edited by Cambridge academics Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy. ̽��ֱ��book, which comes out in paperback on Armistice Day (11 November 2015) looks at the cultural and societal narrative of a Britain struggling to find itself in the wake of conflict. Part of this struggle was a national drive to increase the health of the nation and produce a generation raised on safe milk, housed in sanitary conditions and provided with a secure framework.

̽��ֱ��book explores how selected writers, artists and composers sought to bear witness to the war and the disappointment of peace. It’s one of the few volumes to look comparatively at British, German and Austrian sources, reading Virginia Woolf alongside Arthur Schnitzler and Alfred Döblin, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Krenek alongside Arthur Bliss, Elizabeth Bowen and Ford Madox Ford, and unpublished letters by both German and British soldiers. Contributors include Andrew Frayn, Alison Hennegan, Klaus Hofmann, Jane Potter, George Simmers, and Alexander Watson. Adrian Barlow discusses British and German war memorials.

Both Tate and Kennedy study the First World War but neither is a historian in the conventional sense. Tate is a specialist in the literature of conflict and Kennedy is a biographer with an interest in the relationship between words and music. ̽��ֱ��essays they bring together in Silent Morning look behind the practical measures taken to improve hygiene and housing to reveal the deeper cultural forces at work. Evident in art, literature and music, these ways of seeing the world shaped much more than government policies: they had a profound and enduring impact on people’s lives on both sides of the conflict.

̽��ֱ��chapter in Silent Morning contributed by Tate is titled ‘King Baby’. It covers new ground in its analysis of underlying attitudes to child development and how these were shaped by the not-quite peace that unfolded when an Armistice was declared in November 1918. In her exploration of the literature of the period, Tate focuses first and foremost on babies. Her journey into the unconscious of the domestic sphere embraces the work of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield as well as the manuals that exerted strong influences on childcare practice.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised. She reminds us that war traumatises – but also that peace, and the absence of the sound of guns, can be traumatic too. ̽��ֱ��uncertain and sullied cease of conflict that followed was described by the poet Eleanor Farjeon in chilling terms:

I am awful as my brother War,
I am the sudden silence after clamour.
I am the face that shows the seamy scar
When blood has lost its frenzy and its glamour.

When Woolf too describes the disappointment of peace, she turns to childhood as her point of reference. ̽��ֱ��build-up to Armistice is like the excitement of a birthday. Inevitably, the day itself disappoints yet the charade that everything’s lovely has to be maintained. “So on a birthday,” she writes, “when for some reason things have gone wrong, it was a point of honour in the nursery to pretend. Years later one could confess what a horrid fraud it seemed.”

Rather than returning as heroes, many men who came back from the First World War were broken and stripped of individual agency. Some were empty and angry; some could be violent. Many of those who went to war never came back. Bowen’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ describes a young widow, Mrs Dickinson, containing her grief for her dead husband Toppy beneath a mask of elegance and poise. ̽��ֱ��Dickinsons’ seven-year-old son, Frederick, who had been just a baby when his father died, cries and cries. His mother is embarrassed by this “great blubbering boy” who is “too big to cry”.

Perhaps poor Frederick had been raised according to the method set out by Truby King, a pioneer in modern parenting. Enthusiastically embraced in the wake of the First World War, King’s views made a perfect partner for the nationwide programmes (such as Baby Week) aimed at raising standards of hygiene and nutrition.

King recommended a strict, and largely loveless, schedule. An extraordinary man, whose career took in dairy farming and the cultivation of roses, King was also superintendent of a lunatic asylum. He observed that calves thrived when they were fed regularly. Babies, believed King, should be fed every four hours (not at night) with sleep in between. Even their bowel movements should be regulated. Over-stimulation (too much play and excitement) was to be avoided; physical contact was spoiling.

When the guns went silent, and a semblance of normality crept into the lives of those who had survived the war, a gaping absence asserted itself. “Babies born after the Armistice come into what seems like a formless, unpredictable world,” writes Tate. “In the many families which take up the Truby King method, babies’ tiny lives are vigorously regulated, thus providing a comforting structure – a ‘container’ which at least makes the adults feel more secure.”

A caption below a photo of two bonny girls in King’s book ̽��ֱ��Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Month reads: “A doctor’s children. Healthy, hardy, happy little girls, aged two and nearly four years. Good jaws and sound teeth. Nursed four-hourly from birth – never more than five times in twenty-four hours; plenty of fresh air and exercise – never any coddling.”

By mechanising babies, and raising them in a sterile environment, parents perhaps tried to make the world secure for themselves. King’s literature on the best way to bring up baby was devoured by many of the professionals seeking to improve the nation’s health. His methods were ‘scientific’. A new generation of maternity nurses was trained in the ‘Truby King method’. ̽��ֱ��Plunket nurses (named after King’s patrons Lord and Lady Plunket) helped mothers to breastfeed and guided them through their babies’ early development. Plunket nurses adhered to routine; they wouldn’t ‘give in’ to a crying child.

Tate shows how Mansfield captures the cruel effects of this detached style of parenting in her short story ‘Bliss’. Bertha is a middle class mother who employs a full-time nanny. Her husband boasts of his lack of interest in his child. “Don’t ask me about my baby. I never see her.” When Bertha visits her daughter one evening, the child is delighted while nanny experiences the unscheduled visit as a disruption to a regime that must be maintained at all costs. Bertha suddenly realises that the situation is tragic for both for herself and her child.

̽��ֱ��focus of Mansfield’s story is not Bertha’s marriage but her relationship with her daughter. “Many of her [Mansfield’s] stories of modern life are miniature tragedies, rooted, in many cases, in the unwitting neglect of children,” Tate writes. For Truby King, children had no point of view: a regulated regime was best for them, regardless of how much they screamed with hunger. King’s inflexible routine for baby-rearing imposed military discipline on the messy chaos that is small babies.

King did face criticism from contemporaries – among those who argued against him was Dr GD Laing who experienced the pitiful cries of little ones being ignored until the allotted hour for feeding. Research by psychoanalysts John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion later showed that King’s system, though it succeeded with some babies, was disastrous for many. ̽��ֱ��infants who, desperately hungry or hurting, screamed themselves into silence may well have been traumatised – and early trauma has been linked to depression.

Those who suffer terribly in war seldom speak of their experiences as there are no words to describe it. They pass on their distress in other ways. In her memoir Alfred and Emily (2008), the novelist Doris Lessing (born in 1919) revisited her childhood. Her father lost a leg fighting in the First World War; her mother was a nurse looking after the war-wounded. “Do children feel their parents’ emotions,” Lessing wonders. “Yes, they do… ̽��ֱ��Great War… squatted over my childhood. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.”

̽��ֱ��Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice is published by Manchester ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset images: newspaper advert for Nestle; images from Mothercraft by Truby King's daughter, Mary; newspaper advert for Cow & Gate.

A collection of essays edited by Drs Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy looks at the legacy of the First World War through the lens of the creative arts. As a specialist in the literature of conflict, Tate explores the ways in which writers expressed the impact of trauma on families – and child rearing in particular.

Tate argues that, while many soldiers and civilians felt infantilised by war, babies were, in a sense, militarised

Figure from Mothercare, published by Truby King's daughter, Mary

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Out of mind, out of sight: suppressing unwanted memories reduces their unconscious influence on behaviour

jfp40 — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:09:10 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, part-funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and published online in PNAS, challenges the idea that suppressed memories remain fully preserved in the brain’s unconscious, allowing them to be inadvertently expressed in someone’s behaviour. ̽��ֱ��results of the study suggest instead that the act of suppressing intrusive memories helps to disrupt traces of the memories in the parts of the brain responsible for sensory processing.

̽��ֱ��team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) have examined how suppression affects a memory’s unconscious influences in an experiment that focused on suppression of visual memories, as intrusive unwanted memories are often visual in nature.

After a trauma, most people report intrusive memories or images, and people will often try to push these intrusions from their mind, as a way to cope. Importantly, the frequency of intrusive memories decreases over time for most people. It is critical to understand how the healthy brain reduces these intrusions and prevents unwanted images from entering consciousness, so that researchers can better understand how these mechanisms may go awry in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Participants were asked to learn a set of word-picture pairs so that, when presented with the word as a reminder, an image of the object would spring to mind. After learning these pairs, brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants either thought of the object image when given its reminder word, or instead tried to stop the memory of the picture from entering their mind.

̽��ֱ��researchers studied whether suppressing visual memories had altered people’s ability to see the content of those memories when they re-encountered it again in their visual worlds. Without asking participants to consciously remember, they simply asked people to identify very briefly displayed objects that were made difficult to see by visual distortion. In general, under these conditions, people are better at identifying objects they have seen recently, even if they do not remember seeing the object before—an unconscious influence of memory. Strikingly, they found that suppressing visual memories made it harder for people to later see the suppressed object compared to other recently seen objects.

Brain imaging showed that people’s difficulty seeing the suppressed object arose because suppressing the memory from conscious awareness in the earlier memory suppression phase had inhibited activity in visual areas of the brain, disrupting visual memories that usually help people to see better. In essence, suppressing something from the mind’s eye had made it harder to see in the world, because visual memories and seeing rely on the same brain areas: out of mind, out of sight.

Over the last decade, research has shown that suppressing unwanted memories reduces people’s ability to consciously remember the experiences. ̽��ֱ��researchers’ studies on memory suppression have been inspired, in part, by trying to understand how people adapt memory after psychological trauma. Although this may work as a coping mechanism to help people adapt to the trauma, there is the possibility that if the memory traces were able to exert an influence on unconscious behaviour, they could potentially exacerbate mental health problems. ̽��ֱ��idea that suppression leaves unconscious memories that undermine mental health has been influential for over a century, beginning with Sigmund Freud.

These findings challenge the assumption that, even when supressed, a memory remains fully intact, which can then be expressed unconsciously. Moreover, this discovery pinpoints the neurobiological mechanisms underlying how this suppression process happens, and could inform further research on uncontrolled ‘intrusive memories’, a classic characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr Michael Anderson, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit said: “While there has been a lot of research looking at how suppression affects conscious memory, few studies have examined the influence this process might have on unconscious expressions of memory in behaviour and thought. Surprisingly, the effects of suppression are not limited to conscious memory. Indeed, it is now clear, that the influence of suppression extends beyond areas of the brain associated with conscious memory, affecting perceptual traces that can influence us unconsciously. This may contribute to making unwanted visual memories less intrusive over time, and perhaps less vivid and detailed.”

Dr Pierre Gagnepain, lead author at INSERM in France said: “Our memories can be slippery and hard to pin down. Out of hand and uncontrolled, their remembrance can haunt us and cause psychological troubles, as we see in PTSD. We were interested whether the brain can genuinely suppress memories in healthy participants, even at the most unconscious level, and how it might achieve this. ̽��ֱ��answer is that it can, though not all people were equally good at this. ̽��ֱ��better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this process arising from this study may help to better explain differences in how well people adapt to intrusive memories after a trauma”

New research shows that, contrary to what was previously assumed, suppressing unwanted memories reduces their influence on behaviour, and sheds light on how this process happens in the brain.

It is now clear that the influence of suppression extends beyond areas of the brain associated with conscious memory. This may contribute to making unwanted visual memories less intrusive over time, and perhaps less vivid and detailed.

Dr Michael Anderson

QThomas Bower

Self Portrait 6

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