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When I write about Trauma Altered Development (TAD) for survivors of extreme, severe infant-child maltreatment in a malevolent environment, I am not making this up.  We must empower ourselves by knowing the truth.

I have spent the better part of the past 48 hours thinking about the word ‘symptom’ in an effort to understand how those of us who suffered from enough early trauma to have TAD must evidently ‘display’ enough similar ‘symptoms’ to end up fitting ‘mental illness’ profiles that match ‘diagnostic categories’.

I KNOW there is something wrong with this picture!!

Yesterday I did a basic Google search for this two word combination, ‘mental symptom’ and received seven million, two hundred and thirty responses.

Today I did a basic Google search for ‘trauma altered development’ and received six million nine hundred and sixty responses.

I believe I am trying to think my way through a very big problem with very little intellectual light to guide me.

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The word ‘symp-tom’ came into modern English in its present form from Greek in 1541.  The prefix part of the word ‘sym’ means ‘with, together with’ and the suffix part of the word ‘tom’ relates to ‘body’ (as in ‘ana-tom-y’).  I know nothing about the Greek language, so I am left simply trying to put together what I think when I consider the English word ‘symptom’ with what it really might mean (see bottom of this post).

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I spent my entire afternoon yesterday searching online for a connection between ‘symptom’ and concepts of medicine.  My search took me backwards in time 5000 years as I looked for the largest ‘tree trunk’ of thinking about medicine in ancient cultures the world over from which any modern day thinking on ‘symptoms’ might have originated.  The thoughts and links I collected yesterday are contained together at *SYMPTOMS: 120809 working notes, and represent what I call ‘interactive thinking’.  These notes are not – yet – even placed into a linear timeline because I am still thinking!  It is clear that the Greeks did not ‘invent medicine’!

The word ‘symptom’ seems to refer to the subjective experience of describing how it is to be within and with one’s body.  It says nothing about what anyone does with that information.  If we use the symptoms that a person reports to place them into any ‘diagnostic category’, physically or ‘mentally’, this happens entirely based on outsider thinking about what ‘bird’ the ‘feather’ of the symptom might be connected to in its origins.

If 100 separate groups of people were to examine the same ‘fallen feather’ (symptom) in an effort to determine what kind of bird it originated from, if they do not all have enough of the right kind of information, they will not all come to the same conclusion.

When those of us who experienced severe trauma and maltreatment during our critical infant-child growth and developmental stages attempt to describe our subjective experience of what it is like to live in and with our body that was forced to adapt through our Trauma Altered Development, what is taken as our ‘symptoms’ leave us only with the option of being stigmatized, labeled, and assigned to a ‘mental illness’ diagnostic category (usually more than one).

It would be a massive understatement to say that at a minimum at least 50% of so-called ‘mentally ill’ or ‘behaviorally disturbed’ people suffered from Trauma Altered Development.  If that minimum of 50% of us were to be simply removed from any consideration of these diagnosis, where would that leave the field of ‘mental’ and ‘behavioral’ so-called ‘health’ professionals?  To put it nicely, they would be left in a quandary of professional disarray.

Our current medical model would rather all survivors rather than the ‘experts’ be left in a quandary and in disarray.  I started my online interactive thinking yesterday by considering what those who held power during his time, as implemented through the Inquisition, did to Galileo in the 1630s.  His radical-thinking book about the position and movement of the earth in relation to the sun was banned by the Catholic Church for over 200 years!  How well does that kind of power-over-information process continue to operate today for anyone who truly challenges contemporary thought regarding the misinformation applied toward anyone who is considered ‘mentally ill’ in our society?

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The work of today’s developmental neuroscientists is giving us enough new information about the consequences of severe early infant-child maltreatment through Trauma Altered Development to challenge current medical model ‘mental health’ thinking in an equally challenging way that Galileo’s findings challenged the whole conception of the arrangement of the cosmos held by the Church nearly 400 years ago.

Although the work of Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group is based on an accumulation of research done by many, many people, it is to Teicher’s publication that I point my writing today.  This single article changed my entire life when I found it because it changed how I ‘am with my body’ as a Trauma Altered Development infant-child abuse survivor.

I hope the scanned pages of this article presented here today for readers’ general education comes through on your computer clear enough to read.  I realize the style and content of the writing will probably be difficult and unfamiliar, but read as much of it as you can.  Google search brain regions and terms that are foreign to you.

The information presented in this article, when taken seriously and understood, has the power to completely change the way we consider TAD ‘symptom’ consideration because this information is about the REAL ‘bird’ the ‘feathers’ of our symptoms came from.

The current medical model of ‘mental health’ can no longer be considered to be the center of our conceptual universe regarding ‘symptoms’.  Human resiliency factors that allow a human infant-child to adapt its body-brain-mind-self to malevolent traumatic conditions during critical growth and development must take its place.  It is time to move out of the Dark Ages-Middle Ages in our thinking.

We do not have ‘mental illness’ symptoms.  We are Trauma Altered Development people:

*SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

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‘Sym’ or ‘syn’ as a prefix:

Main Entry: syn-

Variant(s): or sym-

Function: prefix

Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, from syn with, together with

1 : with : along with : together <synclinal> <sympetalous>
2 : at the same time <synesthesia>

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Main Entry: symptom

Function: noun

Etymology: Late Latin symptomat-, symptoma, from Greek symptōmat-, symptōma happening, attribute, symptom, from sympiptein to happen, from syn- + piptein to fall — more at feather

Date: 1541

1 a : subjective evidence of disease or physical disturbance; broadly : something that indicates the presence of bodily disorder b : an evident reaction by a plant to a pathogen
2 a : something that indicates the existence of something else <symptoms of an inner turmoil> b : a slight indication : trace

synonyms see sign

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symptom

1. A characteristic sign or indication of the existence of something else.
2. A sign or an indication of disorder or disease, especially when experienced by an individual as a change from normal function, sensation, or appearance.
3. Etymology: from about 1541, earlier sinthoma (1398), from Medieval Latin (c.700-c.1500) sinthoma, “symptom of a disease”; from Late Latin (c.300-c.700) symptoma, from Greek symptoma (genitive symptomatos), “a happening, an accident, a disease”; from the stem of sympiptein, “to befall”; from syn-, “together” + piptein, “to fall”. Spelling was altered in English by Middle French (c.1400-c.1600) and Late Latin forms.

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