The trauma of separation
As US begins to hand back children to immigrants, the damage done to them could well be incalculable
Heart rate shoots up
Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenalin. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages.
In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.
“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, paediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”
Neurological damage
Nelson has studied this form of damage.
In 2000, the Romanian government invited Nelson and a team of researchers into its state orphanages to advise them on a humanitarian crisis that the country’s previous policies had created.
For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children. Ceausescu believed that ratcheting up the country’s birth rate would boost Romania’s economy. Instead, the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000
children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.
At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking. We had to make up a rule for ourselves as researchers that we would never cry in front of the children. Whenever one of us felt ourselves tearing up, we would walk out of the room.”
As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.
Impact on brain: Less white and grey matter
Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely
made up of fibres that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less grey matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.
The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a light bulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100 watt bulb to 30 watts.”
Poor IQ performance
Children who had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life, scored significantly lower on IQ tests later in life. Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken. Stressful situations that would usually prompt physiological
responses in other people — increased heart rate, sweaty palms — would provoke nothing in the children. What alarmed researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.
Loss of touch and emotional contact
The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.
From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Centre. Skinto-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Fortuna said.
A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.
Aggression, withdrawal and cognitive difficulties
Other studies have shown separation leading to increased aggression, withdrawal and cognitive difficulties.
“If you take the moral, spiritual, even political aspect out of it, from a strictly medical/ scientific point of view, what we as a country are doing to these children at the border is unconscionable,” said Luis Zayas, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “The harm [the] government is causing will take a lifetime to undo.”
To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.”
In a petition by the American Academy of Paediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association asking the US to end the separation policy.