adreadfulidea:

elodieunderglass:

jenroses:

star-anise:

thunderboltsortofapenny:

star-anise:

emotional-karuma:

star-anise:

I’m avoiding the thing about Trump’s family separation policy as much as possible because it literally makes me want to melt down in a rage the moment I think about it almost at all, and as a Canadian there’s an incredibly limited amount I can do when I have to keep my own precarious mental health functioning

but I just want you to know that a lot of the field of Attachment Theory in psychology began after WWII, when psychologists examined the physical and psychological health of children sent away from their parents for their own “safety”

and what we found about the psychological results of broken child-caregiver attachment has led us to conclude that it is literally MORE HUMANE to leave families intact in refugee camps in warzones, than to separate the children from their parents, even if those children are sent to the best of all possible environments.

Speaking as a fucking psychologist I just want you to know that if you want to fuck someone up FOR FUCKING LIFE, the BEST possible way to do it, is to abruptly separate them from the adults who love and care for them. For maximum fuckery do it before the age of 3, 5 is pretty damn good at fucking them up for life too, but honestly any time before adulthood is pretty effective. You will fuck them up in a way we just DON’T know how to heal yet. You don’t just leave them catastrophically more at risk for mental illness, learning disorders, addictions, abuse, and future trauma, you also put them at much higher risk of things like diabetes, heart attack, and suicide.

and then I thought about what kind of environments those kids ARE being sent into and I need to throw up now

Op do you have any links to papers or anything? Preferably not paywalled?

Honestly the field is so huge and so broad that I have too many sources rather than too few. The harder thing is pointing to a concise, targeted, tailored-to-be-relevant summary. (But if child trauma experts in the US aren’t working on producing one at this very instant, I’ll eat my hat.)

The two places I recommend starting are the Child Trauma Academy Library and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

American Psychological Association statement on border separation

American Public Health Association statement on border separation

At this point all you need to do is Google search ‘border’ and ‘child abuse’ and you’ll get buried in articles. Google Scholar is about the same

Thanks! @emotional-karuma, there you go. 

Separation is terrible, institutional care is deadly, and these kids are getting both.

Institutional care kills babies. It damages them developmentally, even if the care is “perfect” functionally (clean children, well fed, medical care given) we’re hearing reports that the adults at the facilities are not allowed to offer comfort and that the children are not allowed to hug each other. If people want more, look at the Romanian Orphanage history. I’m not posting links because it makes me cry to think about it. 

One of the more layperson-accessible books on attachment and the results of childhood trauma is The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog. It isn’t perfect, but it’s as easy to read as a novel, and the case studies will stick in your head.

As a Canadian, we can contact Minister Ahmed Hussen and demand that the Safe Third Country agreement be dropped. It’s a bullshit piece of post 9/11 legislation and must go. The numbers are 1 613 995-0777 and 1 416 656-2526.

At the very least we can make sure the immigrants fleeing America have somewhere to go.