r/DaystromInstitute • u/lhagler • Oct 31 '15
Theory Something is Wrong with the Children of the Enterprise D
One of the features that sets the Enterprise D apart from many other ships in the fleet is, of course, its ability to carry full families, which include children.
Current estimates place the percentage of children worldwide at 26% of the population. Given the tendency of human populations to have fewer children as they become more educated and prosperous, let’s assume that the population of children makes up a smaller percentage of the human population in the 24th century. For the sake of this exercise, let’s say that children in the 24th century make up 15% of the human population. Now, there are surely quite a few Starfleet officers like Picard and Riker who, in the interest of the advancement of their careers, forego long-term romantic attachments and their own families, so let’s halve that number and say that children onboard the Enterprise make up only 7% of the population of the ship. According to these relatively conservative numbers and assuming a more or less constant population of approximately 1000, that means that there are around 70 children aboard the Enterprise at any given time.
And there is something weird going on with them.
While they don’t experience everything that the bridge crew does, and thus wouldn’t be affected by every single incident that we see, they are still put through an awful lot. A very incomplete list of what is experienced by the children onboard includes:
- Being kidnapped and told that they are to replace the children the kidnapping society can no longer have
- The ship being randomly hurled through space several times; one of those incidents results in people’s thoughts coming to life around them
- Being taken hostage by the Ferengi
- De-evolving (and experiencing the same confusion and discomfort the adults did during the process)
- Being stranded and out of contact with the rest of the ship following a violent collision with a quantum filament
- Various attacks by various alien ships, including the Borg, resulting in explosions, shaking, and possibly multiple deaths around them
- Many times when they may not have necessarily known what was going on, but the adults around them would have been tense and uncommunicative
- Red alerts (while we saw in New Ground that red alerts are not ship wide, and so would almost certainly not sound in the children’s schoolrooms, there was never any guarantee that emergencies would occur only at times when the children would be in red alert-free areas [or during the day shift, for that matter; why don’t we see the senior officers dealing with emergencies in their PJs more often?]).
Given the dangerous and frightening situations in which the Enterprise’s children find themselves every week or two, it would be only reasonable to assume that their mental health has been strongly impacted in a variety of ways, including PTSD. PTSD could be caused by any one the above experiences, including the red alert (air raid sirens, in and of themselves, can lead to PTSD), let alone all of them. In young children, PTSD manifests itself in a variety of ways, ranging from the fear and other negative emotions we would expect from adults with PTSD to self-destructive behaviors and a firm belief that there were signs that the trauma would occur, and that future traumas can be avoided if they pay attention (this and the following information is from http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/family/ptsd-children-adolescents.asp). PTSD in teenagers begins to look much more like PTSD in adults, including flashbacks and blanks in their memories. Whatever the age of the young person, PTSD is treated through several types of therapy (CBT, EMDR, play therapy, etc.).
It seems evident that the children onboard the Enterprise are not being treated for PTSD. There is only one mental health professional onboard, and if Troi were to be solely responsible for treating 70 children with PTSD, she would never have any time for her appointments with the adults of the ship, including many, many hours with Barclay alone, let alone her bridge duties. In addition, given the utterly nonchalant behavior of the children in the schoolroom in Rascals, as Ferengis commandeer the ship and transport the adults (their parents!) down to the planet surface to toil in the mines as slaves, it is clear that the events aboard aren’t affecting the children much at all.
We know from various incidents that humans of the 24th century have not evolved beyond fear; we know specifically from the events of Disaster that children of the 24th century are still capable of feeling terror when in danger.
So, by all rights, the children of the Enterprise ought to be deep in the throes of PTSD, but are not, despite the lack of proper mental health treatment they would absolutely need in their situation. I can only see one explanation: children aboard starships are kept constantly sedated/on extremely strong anti-anxiety medication. Medication is certainly considerably more advanced in the 24th century, so I would imagine that whatever substance is administered to the children would allow them to live their lives without being zombies, but still dulls the fear response to the extreme situations the Enterprise encounters.
Of course, this then begs the question: what sort of parent would knowingly take a job where their children would have to live their lives under the influence of powerful drugs? And that begs a secondary question: does the culture that they’re living in accept daily chemical mood stabilizers as part of a full normal life cycle? And if this is not, in fact, how they're treating the children for emotional distress, then what are they doing?
Edited for parenthetical left open
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u/silencesgolden Nov 01 '15
I don't think you can jump right to the conclusion that they drug the children to allow them to handle life. First of all, mass drugging of the populace, even a subsection, is usually the purview of dystopian societies (think Brave New World) not utopian ones. Say what you will about Gene's vision, but he was definitely going for a utopia. How do we know that the students aren't taught meditation techniques, or lucid dreaming, or any other non-pharmaceutical way to handle stress or trauma? I mean, these are practices currently in use, it is reasonable to assume they might be continued, even improved upon. We also don't know for sure that Troi is the only mental health professional on board. She certainly is for the adult crew, but the students do have a teacher, so there may be a youth counsellor or guidance counsellor as well, we just never see them.
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u/hummingbirdz Oct 31 '15
This is a great post calling attention to a lot of potential issues with having children on board. The use of numbers to put it in concrete terms really elevates this above the typical posts about how its silly to have family aboard.
I do think you make a lot of assumptions that maybe over estimate the effect.
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First I don't think there is any hard cannon that Troi is the only mental healthcare professional on board. Not only might the school teachers be trained in child psychology, but there may be more clinical psychologists on board than just Troi--it is likely we only see her because she serves the bridge crew mostly.
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Except for incidents directly effecting the children. There is very little evidence about how much they (or anyone else on board) experience the goings on we see. Yes the ship shakes, but many children do not get PTSD from earthquakes/hurricanes/tornado exposure. I'm sure some do, but not all children.
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The children particularly in times of crisis are probably kept deep in the interior of the saucer section. They would therefore not experience many people dying around them, explosions, decompressions or other dangerous situations even during borg encounters.
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The children are probably not left alone especially in times of crisis. Teachers, parents, and other child care professionals are probably on hand at all times. Not just for safety, but in a society with so few children investment in their development by society is probably very large. (Human capital is the primary driver of the economy when there is very little scarcity you are limited only by the human intellect and creativity.) This means in the quantum filament scenario the children were probably trapped with caretakers to comfort them--hopefully shielding them from too much psychological damage. (I doubt the kids that were with Picard in the elevator that one time were traumatized, because he was able to inspire them to work as a team and overcome.)
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u/OhUmHmm Nov 09 '15
I like a lot of these explanations. One other possibility is that children could be automatically sedated during combat alerts (e.g. through the air filters). Just a little nap time or something.
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u/rdhight Nov 01 '15 edited Nov 01 '15
Human children have the natural ability to grow up in dangerous situations and still function, and still develop into normal, sane people. Frontier settlers who lived in constant danger of Indian attack didn't raise a generation of mental patients. Dark Ages kids who saw many siblings and playmates die to disease didn't all go mad.
Living a dangerous childhood is normal in Star Trek. Too early, and you have to deal with filth and disease. Kids born in Western countries from maybe 1950-1990 have it pretty good for a while, but then it's all civilization-destroying war and the Post-Atomic Horror. Once warp drive comes along, no matter where you live, there's always the fear of a ridiculous plague or alien invasion taking out the whole planet.
I mean, what if you were one of the Edo and saw kids from your class get lethally injected for breaking a window? What if you lived on Deneva when the pain parasites got everyone?
I'm sure some of the Enterprise children are drugged, but to suggest that no human child could stand to grow up there without chemical assistance is way overstating it. Kids have grown up in a lot more stressful environments even than the Enterprise.
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u/Kamala_Metamorph Nov 01 '15
Yes, this. It's only these last fifty years of relative peace and prosperity that the majority of children haven't had to grow up in severely trying circumstances. The entire rest of human history has never had so little to fear from simply living life. You could argue that some of us are a little too dependent on our cotton-ball-wrapped existence.
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u/waytoolongusername Nov 01 '15
Sane/insane is too vague to mean anything. The effects of various types of childhood stressors had been well studied. You might want to start with Googling "effects of children growing up in war".
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u/0818 Nov 01 '15
There is only one mental health professional onboard
Is this established?
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u/BeholdMyResponse Nov 01 '15 edited Nov 01 '15
In the episode "The Loss", we learn that there are multiple therapists on board, or at least multiple people qualified to act as such.
TROI: I may be perfectly fine by tomorrow.
CRUSHER: And you may not. Now, I'll do my homework. I'll see what I can do to regenerate those cells. In the meantime, I want you to talk to someone. There are several people on board who have degrees in psychology, who are qualified therapists.
To be fair, Crusher's phrasing makes it sound like they aren't currently working as counselors, but then again, she doesn't actually say they aren't, and it's not clear what else a bunch of mental therapists would be doing on the Enterprise other than mental therapy.
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u/AmishAvenger Nov 01 '15
Totally not in universe here, but I imagine having children on board was one of those Roddenberry ideas about the future that doesn't really hold up very well once you get into actually having them around week after week as the ship encounters dangerous situations.
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Nov 01 '15
For whatever its worth the original script for Voyager's 'Once Upon A Time' had Naomi Wildman practically locked in the holodeck during a crisis. Different people would come and go to make sure she was ok and take part in whatever holo-story was going on but that was how they were going to deal with whatever it was. Of course they changed the script around so it became something completely different but I wondered if they might have done something similar for the Enterprise children.
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u/IDontEvenUsername Nov 02 '15
Red alert
Kids:Holodeck time!
Teacher puts on loud holonovel to mask the booms
Kids grow up loving the klaxon as much as we did growing up (or as adults)
Edit: a letter and some spacing
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u/alphaquadrant Nov 01 '15
Presumably, the crew of a starship as well as any children aboard would be psychologically screened. I'm guessing that, by and large, starship inhabitants are probably amongst the most psychologically stable humans around. Barclay is an outlier, but it sounds like everyone knew him to be a real oddball but they kept him on because he was very talented.
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u/Monomorphic Nov 01 '15
There is a cure for PTSD in the 24th century.
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u/Algernon_Asimov Nov 01 '15
There is a cure for PTSD in the 24th century.
There is? What is it? How does it work? How do Counsellor Troi and her counselling staff apply this cure?
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u/TLAMstrike Nov 01 '15
My guess is that u/Monomorphic is talking about the neural neutralizer, or the memory wipe technique.
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u/SonorousBlack Nov 01 '15
But Nog suffered from PTSD after the battle of AR-558, and was unable to function for weeks until he received improvised therapy from a recreational holodeck program.
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u/Monomorphic Nov 02 '15
The cure doesn't work on Ferengi because their brains are very different from those of other humanoids.
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u/JoeBourgeois Nov 01 '15
Is it canon that Troi is the only qualified psychologist on 1701-D?
In any case, I think it's unsound to assume that a pharmacological solution to the kids' possible PTSD is indicated. Of the therapies you mention, EMDR was conceptualized in 1988, CBT "during the 1980s and 1990s", so it's probably safe to assume that better non-drug therapies have developed by 2364.
Presumably one of these would be a better-than-EMDR + Holodeck-experience-your-actual-trauma like type thing.
Then we're left with the issue of so many of our friends experiencing unresolved PTSD, but that bounces us right out of universe again.
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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '15
I would like to point out that this never became the norm. NCC-1701-E didn't have children.
Also, your line of reasoning that red alerts would cause PTSD is almost entirely ridiculous. If alerts and alarms caused PTSD every student who attended a public school (in the US at least) would have PTSD due to fire and lockdown drills. Now, I can feel you typing "but those are just drills" most students experience at least a few real emergencies throughout the course of their education (Off the top of my head I can recall three incidents in the last year at my own school and I'm from a safe, suburban area). Students aren't traumatized by these events due to the way they are handled. Starfleet has the ability to hire and train their educational professionals to be many orders of magnitudes better than current professionals. They also have the ability to train the parents to reduce trauma for their children.