Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #adversechildhoodexperiences, aggregated by home.social.
Participants needed for a top-ranked study from Alaysha at Coventry University (@covuni):
'ACEs, Rumination & Emotional Dysregulation in Adults with ADHD Traits'
Link to the survey on SurveyCircle: https://www.surveycircle.com/S5H9W4/
Participate now and support research 😊
#AdverseChildhoodExperiences #EmotionalRegulation #rumination #ADHDTraits
#survey #surveyparticipants #mutualsupport #research #surveycircle #coventryuniversity
https://instagr.am/p/DeL1a2sl8Fg/
DATE: September 28, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: The link between parental divorce and depression might not be what it seems
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
A recent study suggests that the increased risk of adult depression often associated with childhood parental divorce is largely explained by the parents’ own mental health and substance use challenges, rather than the divorce itself. By analyzing data from over 128,000 adults, researchers found that once factors like parental mental illness are taken into account, the statistical link between family structure and adult emotional distress mostly disappears. The findings were published in Psychiatry Research.
Past research, such as a 2019 meta-analysis, found that adults who experienced parental divorce during childhood tend to suffer from higher rates of depression and psychological distress. This observation led to a general assumption that the separation itself creates lasting emotional damage. However, family dynamics are complicated, and a marital split is rarely an isolated event. Many children who experience a family breakup also live through other household adversities.
For instance, a 2024 study indicated that adults who go through a divorce often carry higher underlying risks for mental illnesses, such as depression or anxiety. This raises a question about whether shared family vulnerabilities might explain both the breakdown of the marriage and the child’s later struggles. Previous researchers have used large health surveys to look at the long-term consequences of a changing family structure, such as a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 that linked parental divorce to an elevated risk of stroke in older adulthood.
The research, led by Mary Kate Schilke of Tyndale University and Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto, set out to see if the apparent impact of parental divorce holds up when other negative childhood experiences are factored in. They also wanted to look at a growing but under-studied group: adults whose parents never married.
To answer these questions, the authors analyzed data from the 2021-2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. This is a massive telephone survey that collects health information from adults across the United States. The researchers focused on a sample of 128,264 adults. To ensure they were looking at the effects of family structure rather than severe trauma, they excluded anyone who reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse during childhood.
The respondents answered questions about their parents’ marital status before they turned 18, categorized as continuously married, divorced, or never married. The researchers looked at two primary measures of mental health. The first was a self-reported lifetime diagnosis of depression. The second was frequent mental distress, which means the respondent experienced 14 or more days of poor mental health in the past month.
Before taking other background factors into account, the researchers observed a noticeable gap in mental health based on family structure. Adults whose parents were divorced reported a lifetime depression rate of 19.2 percent, and those with unmarried parents reported a rate of 18.7 percent. Both groups were higher than the 14.1 percent rate among adults whose parents stayed married.
A similar pattern appeared for frequent mental distress in the past month. The rates were 13.6 percent for those with divorced parents, 16.3 percent for those with unmarried parents, and 8.5 percent for those with continuously married parents.
The picture changed when the researchers adjusted their statistical models to account for other adverse childhood experiences. They looked at factors like household neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and having a parent who was incarcerated. Two specific factors stood out for their massive impact on the results: parental mental illness and parental substance use.
When the researchers factored in parental mental illness, the association between parental divorce and the adult child’s depression dropped by 68 percent. For adults with unmarried parents, accounting for parental mental illness reduced the association with depression by 52 percent. Parental substance use also played a large role, reducing the link between parental divorce and adult depression by 49 percent.
When all childhood adversities, sociodemographic factors like income and education, and adult health behaviors were accounted for, the link between childhood family structure and adult mental illness was no longer statistically significant. This suggests that a divorce itself is not necessarily the root cause of later mental health struggles. Instead, a cluster of environmental and genetic factors that often accompany a divorce or an unmarried household seem to drive the increased risk.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relies on self-reported data, which means participants might not remember their childhood experiences perfectly. The cross-sectional nature of the survey also means the researchers cannot establish a timeline of events. They do not know if a parent’s mental illness started before or after a divorce, or exactly how old the child was when the separation occurred.
The category for unmarried parents is also quite broad. It lumps together single parents and parents who lived together but never legally married, which are two very different family environments. In addition, the survey only recorded the respondents’ socioeconomic status in adulthood, not during their childhood. A family’s financial situation during a divorce could play a large role in a child’s development, but the researchers did not have the data to track that specific pathway.
The study, “Long After the Split: The Association Between Parental Divorce and Mental Health in Adults,” was authored by Mary Kate Schilke, Philip Baiden, and Esme Fuller-Thomson.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-link-between-parental-divorce-and-depression-might-not-be-what-it-seems/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ParentalDivorce #MentalHealthResearch #DepressionRisk #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #ParentalMentalIllness #ParentalSubstanceUse #FamilyStructure #PsychiatryResearch #MentalHealthAwareness #ChildhoodAdversity
In fact, I'm a big fucking hypocrite because it bothers me to the point of monomania when people REPETITIVELY FIDGET.
Like girls with long hair who cannot stop "brushing" it with their fingers. I want to just SLAP their hands.
… And I'm sure that has NOTHING to do with the fact that I was regularly hauled out of church on Sunday mornings to be SPANKED for not "sitting still like a young lady." Nothing whatsoever. 🙄
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to ruin one too, you know? This trauma is too complex to be the work of just two incompetent, dysregulated adults who shouldn't have had children. Don't dismiss the teamwork or the collective effort society put into shaping me. Give credit where it's due.
I remember last Ramadan reading a thread by someone asking something along the lines of, "If اللّٰه never burdens a soul more than it can bear, then what about someone who unalives themself?"
Bruuuuhh, the replies were infuriating lmao. So, being a survivor myself, I think that's my area of expertise.
I've forgotten what my response was, but let me just tell you my full understanding of it without spiritually bypassing accountability.
Surah Al-Baqarah 2:286 should not be weaponised to erase human accountability. Poverty, abuse, racism, gendered violence, colonialism, genocide, abandonment, and social cruelty are not neutral “burdens from God.” They are manufactured conditions. People create them. Systems sustain them. Society normalises them. Then, when someone breaks under that weight, people suddenly want to spiritualise the outcome instead of asking who helped load the weight onto their back.
When a child grows up to be an ill-adjusted adult with suicidal thoughts, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. A child is part of a family unit, and that family is part of society. What happened to that child for them to grow up carrying burdens so heavy on their shoulders all alone? Why did the person that child became believe that hurting themself more would make their pain more bearable, or that dying was the only way to relieve them of it?
“But they always seemed so happy. They never looked depressed or suicidal.” What does "suicidal and depressed" even look like? I looked pretty when I was struggling with suicidal thoughts; I'm always pretty anyway 🤷🏻♀️ And did you regularly check on them? If the person ends up unaliving themself, then whatever care existed did not reach them where it needed to.
Being depressed and having your thoughts arrive at the conclusion that suicide is the only solution isn't an individual moral failure. Let's make that clear first. It's a sign of a society that abandons care and fails its moral test.
Poverty, racism, exploitation, harassment nobody believes happened, homelessness, racial and gender discrimination, colonialism, genocide, and countless others are not just background conditions. They are systems of harm. When those systems drive someone to depression, despair, or the belief that death is the only relief left, that isn't an individual moral failure. It means the system works as intended: it fails humanity by design, and society fails you.
You see, this is why Muslims should never depoliticise Islam under a global power structure that relies on our dehumanisation. Some of us have internalised that bullshit.
#mentalhealth #politics #activism #disability #Islam #muslimvoices #colonialism #poverty #healthcare #adversechildhoodexperiences #thepersonalispolitical #religioustrauma #structuralviolence
What Yelling Does to a Child’s Brain: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Shouting
Yelling at your child doesn't just hurt their feelings — it physically reshapes their developing brain. Here's the neuroscience, and how to break the cycle
4 Ways Childhood Trauma Physically Changes a Man’s Brain
Originally Published on January 13th, 2026 at 10:23 amIntroduction: More Than a Memory
It is widely understood that childhood trauma, particularly childhood sexual abuse (CSA), leaves deep and lasting psychological scars.
The experience can shape a person’s emotional landscape for a lifetime. It can lead to challenges like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety. For many, the impact feels profound, but the injury itself can seem invisible.
But what if the damage wasn’t just psychological? What if the trauma left a physical, measurable imprint on the very structure of the brain? A new brain imaging study provides compelling evidence that this is exactly what happens.
The research focuses specifically on the long-term neurophysiological effects of CSA in men. We know this is a topic that remains heavily stigmatized and under-researched. Despite its prevalence, with approximately 1 in 25 men in Canada experiencing sexual abuse before age 15 (Heidinger, 2022), the physical toll it takes has been poorly understood until now.
This study begins to change that.
1. Childhood Trauma Physically Alters the Brain’s “Communication Highways”
The researchers used a specialized MRI technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). DTI looks deep inside the brain’s white matter.
You can think of white matter as the brain’s internal communication wiring or its information superhighways. White matter consists of bundles of nerve fibers that connect different brain regions and allow them to work together seamlessly.
The study measured a key property of this wiring called “fractional anisotropy” (FA). In simple terms, FA is a measure of the integrity and efficiency of these communication pathways.
Higher FA values indicate well-organized, healthy wiring. While lower values suggest the wiring may be less organized, frayed, or poorly insulated, leading to disrupted signaling.
The study’s core finding was unequivocal: the group of men with a history of CSA had significantly lower FA values in multiple key brain regions compared to the control group. This provides clear physical proof that the trauma fundamentally rewired the brain’s architecture.
2. The Damage Targets Critical Hubs for Emotion, Memory, and Executive Function
The study revealed that the structural changes were not random. They were concentrated in white matter tracts that are critical for regulating the very functions that many survivors struggle with.
The specific regions affected include:
In short, the brain scans reveal a physical roadmap of the injury, showing that the damage isn’t random. It targets the very systems that survivors rely on to regulate emotion, process memory, and maintain focus.
Are you exploring your trauma? Do you feel your childhood experiences were detrimental to your current mental or physical health? Utilize this free, validated, self-report questionnaire to find out.
Take the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Questionnaire
3. Structural Damage from Childhood Trauma Helps Explain Real-World Cognitive Emotional Challenges
One of the most powerful aspects of this research is how it connects the brain’s physical structure to its real-time function.
Some of the same men who participated in this DTI study also took part in another study that used a functional MRI (fMRI) to see how their brains worked during a challenging mental task (Chiasson et al., 2021).
That fMRI study found that when performing an emotional working memory task, the men with CSA histories showed altered brain activation patterns.
Instead of relying on their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the brain’s executive control center, they showed increased activation in limbic areas, the brain’s emotional hub.
This new DTI study provides a compelling physical explanation for why. The structural damage to the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus (SLF II), the “highway” that leads directly to the dlPFC, helps explain why that executive control center was less active. The damaged road was unable to carry the traffic. It forced the brain to create functional “detours” through more emotional pathways. It directly links the physical brain changes to the functional difficulties survivors experience.
4. This Evidence is a Powerful Tool Against Stigma Around Male Childhood Trauma
For male survivors of CSA, stigma and shame often create immense barriers to seeking help. This research offers a powerful tool to fight that stigma.
Having objective, empirical evidence that trauma causes a tangible, neurophysiological injury helps reframe the survivor’s experience.
It is not “just in their head” or a sign of weakness; it is a physical injury that requires understanding and clinical support.
The study’s authors highlight this crucial implication in their conclusion:
“Raising awareness of the impact of CSA is crucial—not only to help destigmatize the topic and encourage more men to seek help, but also to equip clinicians with a better understanding of CSA’s neuro-physiological effects, ultimately contributing to more effective interventions and improved treatment outcomes.”
By demonstrating the physical reality of traumatic injury, this research helps move the conversation around male CSA away from silence and stigma and toward one of scientific understanding, compassion, and informed care.
Conclusion: A Deeper Understanding of Healing
This study offers a stark and clear message: childhood trauma is a profound event that can physically reshape the brain’s architecture.
For men who have survived childhood sexual abuse, this research provides concrete, scientific validation of their experience. It shows that the challenges they face are rooted in tangible changes to the brain’s white matter.
The findings underscore that healing from trauma is not merely a psychological exercise but a process that involves a brain that has been physically altered.
As we continue to uncover the deep nature of traumatic injury, it prompts a vital question for us all:
How might this change our approach to healing, compassion, and justice for survivors?
Does this ring true for you or someone you love? Share how this article shined a light on behaviors you hadn’t previously understood in the comments below.
Are you a professional looking to stay up-to-date with the latest information on, sex addiction, trauma, and mental health news and research? Or maybe you’re looking for continuing education courses? Then you should stay up-to-date with all of Dr. Jen’s work through her practice’s newsletter!
Do you feel your sexual behavior, or that of someone you love, is out of control? Then you should consult with a professional.
Have you found yourself in legal trouble due to your sexual behavior? Seek assistance before the court mandates it, with Sexual Addiction Treatment Services.
#ACEs #adverseChildhoodExperiences #anxiety #brainImaging #childhoodSexualAbuse #childhoodTrauma #complexTrauma #CSA #depression #diffusionTensorImaging #DTI #emotionalRegulation #executiveFunction #healingAndRecovery #maleSurvivors #menSMentalHealth #mentalHealthEducation #neurobiologyOfTrauma #neuroscience #PTSD #stigma #traumaAndTheBrain #traumaInformedCare #whiteMatter
An idle thought....has anybody researched a possible connection between the kibbutzim and the lack of empathy which seems to characterise Zionism?
Or compared the kibbutzim with the private boarding schools that underpinned the British Empire ? #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #Parenting #TheDeathOfEmpathy
Adverse childhood experiences linked to increased defensive gun use through heightened threat sensitivity https://www.psypost.org/adverse-childhood-experiences-linked-to-increased-defensive-gun-use-through-heightened-threat-sensitivity/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #DefensiveGunUse #ThreatSensitivity #GunSafety #MentalHealth
ActorBen Kingsley recalls his parents "never praised me or acknowledged a gram of talent in me... My mother was very jealous of my success...I never really felt nurtured and protected.”
https://youtu.be/GVBk0OezVyw
[silent video]
See comments by other artists and psychologists, plus multiple programs and resources, in article: How Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma affect our lives and creativity https://thecreativemind.substack.com/p/our-childhood-and-being-a-creative
#childhoodtrauma #adversechildhoodexperiences #traumarecovery
Jezebel: Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth: Ruby Franke’s Business Partner Reportedly Over-Diagnosed Men With ‘Porn Addiction’ https://jezebel.com/jodi-hildebrandt-connexions-therapy-porn-addiction-1850873504 #Jezebel #adversechildhoodexperiences #substancerelateddisorders #pornographyaddiction #behavioraladdiction #childsexualabuse #sexualaddiction #jodihildebrandt #stephaniejones #adampaulsteed #sexualhealth #socialissues #pornography #rubyfranke #childabuse #connexions #addiction
I need a crown and am abjectly terrified it will turn into a root canal. This happened with a crown in 2018 and the dentist was so terrible that I’ve been unable to face this work. I’m working on it and we have a wonderful new dentist.
I was sharing the shame I have around my root canal with my therapist. She told me that a need for more extensive dental work has been linked to high ACE scores! With my score sitting at a 9/10, it’s likely that I’m experiencing the effects of that in my teeth.
“… using motive to prevent mass shootings will just get you a useless answer to the wrong question.
“The right question is: What happened to this person? What happened to a beautiful baby boy to turn him into an 18-year-old killer spouting racist screed?
“In those questions—and looking at the answers through the lens of positive and adverse childhood experiences—lie our solutions.”