Trauma reaches beyond urban centers like Milwaukee, speaker says. Just look at border fiasco.

In a year when Milwaukee hosts multiple conferences on civilian trauma, the keynote speaker at the latest forum on Wednesday wanted to drive home just how far the trauma epidemic reaches beyond the nation’s economically ravaged urban centers.

Speaking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, nationally recognized trauma expert Jim Henry opened his talk by projecting a stark image onto the screens behind him:

It showed a 2-year-old migrant girl sobbing while a United States border patrol agent does a pat-down search of her mother under the White House “zero tolerance” policy, which has separated children from immigrant parents who cross illegally into the U.S. Many of the children have been placed in cage-like detention facilities, triggering a domestic and international backlash against U.S. immigration practices. 

“We can’t have a trauma conference without acknowledging this,” said Henry, co-founder of the Southwest Michigan Children’s Trauma Assessment Center and a veteran 38-year counselor in trauma-focused practices.

Later Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to keep migrant families together at the U.S.-Mexico border, abandoning his earlier claim that he neither caused, nor could reverse, the policy.

But echoing comments in the past week by other trauma researchers, Henry said the separation of children from their parents and locking them in cages has already created “the significant risk” of a traumatic response that could haunt the child later in life with invisible neurological scars. 

The point he wanted to make, he said, is that the 21st-century epidemic of civilian trauma reaches across the nation as well as the state of Wisconsin and the “trauma community” of Milwaukee.

Also speaking at Wednesday's conference, UWM associate professor Joshua Mersky said: “Trauma is prevalent and consequential.”

Public health researchers link trauma in children and adults to mental illness and depression as well as unemployment, uncontrolled aggression and drug and alcohol abuse. Traumatized people are conditioned to see the world as threatening and pain-inducing; many find it difficult to hold a job or manage relationships.

The UWM conference, called Trauma in our Community, was a day-long event that packed an overflow crowd of 350 into the ballroom at the student union on the east side campus.

The debilitating after-effects of trauma are antithetical to the American idea that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Henry said. There’s apparently a widespread belief that “we separate children at the border and they’ll get over it,” Henry said. “We know that’s a false assumption.”

"A Time to Heal," a Journal Sentinel series published last year, explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of urban life.

Trauma is new to the nation’s social and economic debate because the metrics that document the epidemic also are new. But the newfound fascination with trauma-informed practices creates a few major misunderstandings, said Henry, who also is a professor at Western Michigan University.

“Trauma informed care” has become an empty “buzzword” and “fad,” he said. “Everyone says they are ‘trauma informed,’ but none of them are,” he said, castigating those who confuse basic “trauma awareness” with the time-intensive work of helping people understand their traumatized past, in meeting after meeting, and slowly helping them build purpose and rekindle resilience.

“Services, services everywhere —  but do they work?” Henry said. 

UWM, which has teams of trauma researchers, was the main sponsor of Wednesday’s event.  Across town, Marquette University this year is working to build a new coalition of social agencies, nonprofits and even criminal justice representatives that want to tackle the city’s epidemic of trauma.