We
know the effects of childhood traumas like abuse and neglect on later
substance abuse. But what impact does second hand trauma have? A
study published in the August issue of the journal Addiction shows that when a child under age 15 is exposed to a
family member’s trauma (e.g. a parent or sibling being the victim of violent
assault or a parent’s cancer diagnosis), that child has approximately twice the
risk of struggling with drug and alcohol problems 6 years later.
The data comes from 1.4 million children born in Sweden
between 1984 and 1995. Researchers used codes from the Swedish Hospital
Discharge Register to discover which of these children had family members that
had experienced medical trauma. Specifically, researchers could tell from these
codes when a child’s parent or sibling had been diagnosed with cancer, had
suffered an injury leading to permanent disability, had been the victim of an
assault, or had died. Using these four events, researchers gave each of these
1.4 million children a score from 0-4 roughly representing the amount of
secondhand trauma children had experienced while young.
From medical, legal and pharmacy records, researchers could
also tell which of these children went on to be diagnosed with substance abuse
problems in their 20s.
Of course, the researchers tried to control for all of the
many factors that might also cause drug use in populations that also happened
to experience childhood trauma. For example, they took into account things like
socioeconomic status, drug use in the family, psychological wellbeing, and
parents’ education.
What levels of trauma led to what levels of substance abuse?
Not only kids who scored a “4” on the scale of traumas, but even kids who
experienced one of these secondhand
traumatic events had twice the risk of later drug abuse.
As you might expect, children who experienced the death of a
parent were at greatest risk. This was followed by children whose parent or
sibling had been the victim of violent assault – and the researchers point out
that the fact of assault in many cases may be due to what they call an
“underlying behavior type” that is associated with the risk of assault. Permanent
disability due to injury and cancer diagnosis were also significant risk
factors.
Interestingly, substance abuse was even higher in children
whose siblings had experienced trauma than it was in children whose parents had
been traumatized.
Though the researchers are careful to point out the
difficulty of disentangling trauma from environment – meaning children who
experience a family member’s trauma may be surrounded by other environmental factors
that also promote drug abuse – they also point out that their sample size of
1.4 million children allows them to draw strong conclusions from this data.
It seems that in addition to the known risk factors of
abuse, neglect and other traumatic events that a child experiences directly,
the indirect or secondhand traumas a child experiences can lead to later
substance abuse.
**
Richard Taite is founder and CEO of Cliffside Malibu,
offering evidence-based, individualized addiction treatment based on the Stages
of Change model. He is also coauthor with Constance Scharff
of the book Ending
Addiction for Good.
