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The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harris
Jul. 25th, 2021 12:55 pmThe Deepest Well: Healing the Effects of Childhood Adversity
3/5. Part memoir, part explainer by the Surgeon General of California about how she got interested in the impact of Adverse Childhood Events on adult health. (The original ACE scale is scored out of 10: the higher your score, the more astronomical the rise in your odds of later heart disease, mental illness, etc.) She chronicles her work in a pediatric clinic in a low-income neighborhood, her efforts to develop a treatment protocol for childhood toxic stress, and the pushback she got.
Interesting and readable. If you want a much more technical discussion of the impacts of stress on physiology, you want Robert Sapolsky, not this. But this is full of anecdotes and vivid recollections, and it is very convincing.
I don't need convincing. My ACE score is 4, which is the bend point in the graphs where things start looking noticeably worse. What toxic stress is and how it works is something I did not need explained to me. It's just something I needed a name put to. I definitely had a oh, that's what that is moment when I first heard about the ACE scale about a decade ago. My kid's score is zero right now. I think about that a lot, and how to keep it there.
Anyway, it's a good book. I do take serious issue with some territory she gets into towards the end when she confronts her critics. She says – rightly – that toxic stress is not an artifact only of poverty or of communities of color. Then, though she acknowledges that being the object of racism is itself a stressor, she goes to lengths to say she thinks it's divisive to talk about childhood stress in those terms because white kids in Appalachia can experience stress too. Yeah, okay, so we're just going to ignore the disparate impacts of poverty and violence on different communities then, eh. This is the sort of position you take when you're a woman of color in public life and you want to short-circuit various accusations. It's not a very defensible argument, though.
Content notes: Various kinds of child harm and abuse discussed with compassion, but distance. However, the author reads the audiobook, and it's hard to listen to her voice break when she briefly discusses the stillbirth of her son.
3/5. Part memoir, part explainer by the Surgeon General of California about how she got interested in the impact of Adverse Childhood Events on adult health. (The original ACE scale is scored out of 10: the higher your score, the more astronomical the rise in your odds of later heart disease, mental illness, etc.) She chronicles her work in a pediatric clinic in a low-income neighborhood, her efforts to develop a treatment protocol for childhood toxic stress, and the pushback she got.
Interesting and readable. If you want a much more technical discussion of the impacts of stress on physiology, you want Robert Sapolsky, not this. But this is full of anecdotes and vivid recollections, and it is very convincing.
I don't need convincing. My ACE score is 4, which is the bend point in the graphs where things start looking noticeably worse. What toxic stress is and how it works is something I did not need explained to me. It's just something I needed a name put to. I definitely had a oh, that's what that is moment when I first heard about the ACE scale about a decade ago. My kid's score is zero right now. I think about that a lot, and how to keep it there.
Anyway, it's a good book. I do take serious issue with some territory she gets into towards the end when she confronts her critics. She says – rightly – that toxic stress is not an artifact only of poverty or of communities of color. Then, though she acknowledges that being the object of racism is itself a stressor, she goes to lengths to say she thinks it's divisive to talk about childhood stress in those terms because white kids in Appalachia can experience stress too. Yeah, okay, so we're just going to ignore the disparate impacts of poverty and violence on different communities then, eh. This is the sort of position you take when you're a woman of color in public life and you want to short-circuit various accusations. It's not a very defensible argument, though.
Content notes: Various kinds of child harm and abuse discussed with compassion, but distance. However, the author reads the audiobook, and it's hard to listen to her voice break when she briefly discusses the stillbirth of her son.
