Childhood trauma data explodes myth of … ‘Not in my small town’
Once solidly middle-class, Rock County today harbors the state’s highest scores for childhood trauma.
SECOND OF TWO PARTS
JANESVILLE – Traffic on Main St. is lazy as Kyle Pucek strolls past tidy homes with wide front porches. “I lost a lot of friends in the last couple years,” Pucek, 41, says matter of factly. He counts 10.
A car rolls past and a woman waves at Pucek. The two shout greetings.
“That’s Kirsten,” Pucek volunteers almost offhandedly, “an ex-heroin addict who’s also in recovery.” Pucek grew up with her, and with her fiancé, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009.
Contacted later, Kirsten Moore added that her teenage son became attached to her late fiancé’s brother — and then the brother died from a heroin overdose, too, less than two years later.
Of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, Rock County falls into the highest tier of overdose deaths, hospitalizations and emergency room visits linked to opioids and heroin, as ranked by state health authorities.
The drug crisis in Rock County reflects another epidemic, one that preceded it, sometimes by a full generation or more — and statistically was invisible until only recently.
It’s an epidemic of abuse, neglect and maltreatment of children. It can mean an environment in which adults are alcoholic, mentally unwell, incarcerated or violent — or too stressed by lack of time or money to have any emotional capacity left for children.
A new body of data shows that childhood trauma can lead to lifelong afflictions, both physical and behavioral, including post-traumatic stress disorders. Too often, it leads to neurological impairment. It can precede depression, unemployment and even homelessness and suicide. In high-trauma communities, the workforce can become incapacitated.
The same data also shows a crippling ripple effect: trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing, and frequently transfer from generation to generation, and neighborhood to neighborhood. The same downward dynamic can be found in rural areas and smaller towns as in the nation’s aging urban centers like Milwaukee.
Once solidly middle-class, Rock County today harbors the state’s highest scores for childhood trauma, the deepest plunge in income since the turn of the century, and one of the most extreme drug epidemics.
Of the state’s 72 counties, Rock County is home to the fourth-highest share of single-parent households (17.6%) behind Menominee, Milwaukee and Kenosha counties (28%, 23% and 18.4%, respectively). In the last 20 years, households in the county accepting FoodShare entitlements rose 310%. In the last 15 years, childhood poverty surged 150%, the second fastest increase in the state. The rate at which babies in the county are born with opioids, heroin or other addictive drugs in their bodies more than tripled from 2013 to 2016.
“Soon, we’ll have a whole generation of grade school kids who all have in common a parent who overdosed and died of heroin,” said Janesville Police Officer Justin Stubbendick. “It breaks my heart to think.”
When the Pick ’n Save grocery on the south side closed one month ago, citing “long-term financial under-performance,” Janesville ended up with a food desert around the old General Motors autoworks, which closed in 2008.
“Our foster system is completely overwhelmed,” said Shari Faber, a public health activist at the nonprofit Janesville Mobilizing 4 Change. In her work, Faber directly links childhood trauma and heroin use, as struggling kids grow up to be struggling parents. Hoping to break the cycle, Faber recently won a federal grant to create new preventative programs that target the current generation of children growing up amid drug use — in a region where police sometimes find babies crawling on the same rugs where they find needles.
Trauma researchers believe the seeds of today’s distress often were planted years earlier when the current generation of adults were children.
The adverse childhood experience survey — known as the ACE test — asks whether someone was exposed as a child to violence, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness or incarceration. Those with multiple “yes” answers bear increasing odds of later-life struggles, which often resemble post-traumatic stress symptoms in military veterans.
In statewide results – collected from 2011 to 2015 — Rock County had the highest percentage of high-risk people who admitted to four or more ACE indicators as a share of the population (24% vs. a statewide average of 14%). It showed the fewest percentage with scores of zero (31% vs. 43%). The county’s ACE scores are higher than the city of Milwaukee, which registered 20% with four plus (although ACE scores spike within specific neighborhoods with concentrated unemployment).
Boom and bust
In its heyday in the last century, Rock County was the epitome of heartland prosperity. Apart from farming, the county had its share of foundries and factories — and above all, the GM assembly lines that built Chevys by the millions.
Like much of the American manufacturing economy, employment at GM in Janesville peaked in the 1970s, when the automaker employed 7,100 in middleclass jobs with enviable benefits. A halo of local supplier industries orbited around GM.
Then came downsizings. When it closed its gates nine years ago, GM employed 1,200 in Janesville — not counting the supplier businesses it took down with it.
Janesville’s oldest major employer was going through the same downward spiral.
George Parker began making luxury fountain pens in 1888, and shipped them around the world. Parker Pen once employed more than 1,000 workers. But by the time it closed in 2009, headcount was down to 150. Sold and resold, Parker Pen still exists as a brand headquartered in France.
A few farm fields to the south, through the Rock River valley, the factory town of Beloit rode the same boom and bust. In the last century it was home to Beloit Corp., once the world’s largest manufacturer of the machinery that mass produces publishing-grade paper. It belonged to the pulp and paper ecosystem that powered much of Wisconsin in the last century. As recently as the 1990s, Beloit Corp. employed 2,000 — but it shrunk and then declared bankruptcy in 1999, leaving behind a cavernous industrial skeleton on the banks of the river.
A few employers have moved into the county, including a new warehouse for a retail chain of dollar stores. As a philanthropic effort in her hometown, Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks is pumping tens of millions of dollars into the downtown; her dollars converted the old Beloit Corp. foundry into space for start-up companies, breathing new life into the downtown.
The county’s unemployment rate is low — only 3.3%, as the chamber of commerce points out. But the index doesn’t distinguish between a part-time minimum wage job and a chief financial officer — it counts both equally. It doesn’t reflect plunging income or anyone who has given up looking for work, meaning the index actually improves when people quit the labor force. It doesn’t count those in jail.
Nor does the unemployment rate reflect the new ladder of downward mobility, creating a new class of working poor, said Janesville Mobilizing 4 Change Director Erin Loveland. “People who had $30-an-hour jobs went on to $8-an-hour jobs,” said Loveland, who ran a Janesville woman’s shelter for 12 years. “That had a big push-down effect because those who typically would take the $8 jobs couldn’t get them, and the homeless shelters filled up.”
“It sounds terrible, but we miss the days of crack,” Loveland said recently as she drove through Janesville. Symptoms were easier to recognize and fewer died.
Working from its office inside the old Parker Pen factory, Loveland’s agency is launching a training program to train police and social workers how to “handle with care” when they encounter a child in a home where an adult overdoses, is arrested or there are “other traumatic events.” Faber cites studies showing that kids struggle in school during the day and cannot sleep at night in homes with drug busts. “An ACE by definition is a house with a drugaddicted parent,” she said.
‘Wounded healers’
Pucek was born to a 17year-old mother who divorced soon afterward. His biological father moved out of town to take a job elsewhere, which limited how much Pucek saw him. “There was never a lot of stability when I was a kid,” he said.
He became a heroin addict in the same way as tens of thousands of other Americans: after an ankle injury at age 23, he said, a physician over-prescribed opioids in unnecessarily strong doses.
Aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, opioids effectively are a synthetic form of heroin, regarded as the world’s deadliest drug. After Pucek’s prescriptions ran out, he discovered that illegal heroin was cheaper and more accessible, hit for hit. It’s a story repeated across the nation.
“I liked to snort,” Pucek said. “You can ingest, shoot, snort or smoke it. It’s a pretty versatile drug.”
By the time he hit bottom, Pucek had lost his job and his marriage and was living in a trailer home. He was hospitalized for one near-overdose and twice for suicide attempts. His sobriety date is Nov. 22, 2013.
The proliferation of heroin in the area was abrupt, spiking with the last recession, Loveland said. “It was shocking how fast it happened,” she said. “At first folks had pills, and then the next minute they all had needles.”
Pucek credits his recovery to 90 days of residential treatment. Like much of the fallout of childhood trauma, treatment for opioid and heroin addiction can be costly, straining standard medical plans and often out of reach to the working poor. The residential care has to extend long enough for the cells of the brain and body to relearn conditioned behavior and control anxiety. There’s therapy and sometimes daily doses of suboxone or methadone to help wean a user into sobriety.
In October, a roster of local nonprofits, police and agencies rented the big barn on the Rock County Fairgrounds for a gathering they promoted as “Hope over Heroin.” Some 150 people showed
“I know one who died of suicide because of an addiction. It’s not six degrees of separation. Everyone knows someone.” Brandon Cook, recovering heroin addict