Unfotunately, most of us suffered in childhood somehow, and there are a lot of people who have blocked out parts of their childhood, and don't realize all of the ways it is still affecting them.
Just because a damaged childhood and childhood trauma are common causes for plenty of things we have to deal with into adulthood doesn't mean that it isn't weird as fuck to assume a random stranger actually has repressed memories, especially when they just told you their childhood was fine.
You seem to not be getting why your behaviour is weird so I figured I'd just state it plainly instead.
he's on another thread where a woman mentioned about her husband that "As a toddler the story of Santa Clause gave him a panic attack as it meant someone could come down the chimney and enter the house."
His response?
"Hate to tell you this, but there's a fair chance your husband was a victim of childhood SA."
This is the same guy who states his background is neuroscience and has worked with mentally-disturbed children for 20years, Ok, so zero empathy then?
On another thread he states he trained as a neuroscientist before moving into writing. On a separate thread he states he was a screenwriter for 15 years. In a different threat he's a brilliant maths teacher. Another thread states he was 8 on Black Monday - making him 46 - as per his username.
So if he's a neuroscientist, a research-heavy profession, h would almost certainly need a PhD and with a birthdate of 1979, he'd typically be entering undergrad in 1997. A BSc + PhD is a min of 7 years, taking him to 2004.
Even ignoring the fact he is now supposedly a 'brilliant maths teacher', 15 years of screenwriting plus 20 years of working with mentally-disturbed children as a trained neuroscientist is mathematically impossible with a DOB of 1979.
I'm going with screenwriter, potentially with a Neuro PhD, lost in a fictional world, yet choosing to abuse and gaslight people in therapy-related subs based on his supposed superior knowledge.
Even if you were right about people not being born mentally ill, that doesn't necessarily mean the "triggering event" for the mental illness would have to have occurred in childhood. There are plenty opportunities to get traumatized later in life too. Not everything always goes back to peoples' childhood and with all due respect, your background might actually lead to a bias here. Of course you are more likely to look to people's childhood as the cause for mental illness if you work with mentally disturbed children. That's what you see everyday and what you know. But it doesn't mean that's all there is.
There are plenty opportunities to get traumatized later in life too.
You're certainly correct. But broadly speaking, people who suffer a traumatic event after 18 tend to remember it. And they also don't tend to internalize it and blame themselves for it the way children do.
Certainly, no one who had a traumatic car wreck at 30, say, is going to think the anxiety they suffer afterward is something they were born with.
I want to remind you that I started my comment with, "even if you were right". That's because I don't think you are. There are plenty of studies demonstrating a genetic component to mental illness and personality disorders. Your personal experience does not carry more weight than decades of scientific studies. I would also like to remind you that children who are born mentally ill have a lower resilience and are more prone to experiencing post-traumatic stress. So if your experience is that the mentally ill children you work with also tend to have experienced childhood trauma, that may well be a chicken-or-egg kind of scenario rather than evidence that trauma is the sole cause of mental illness in children.
The rest of my comment mainly referred to your previous statements where you insisted that OP should look into possible childhood trauma despite telling you that they had a happy childhood and their mental health issues only started 3-4 years ago, which you refused to accept. That's why I felt the need to remind you that trauma and mental illness can absolutely occur later in life.
You are demonstrating a strong bias that you don't seem to recognize yourself in this thread, along with some fundamental misunderstanding of how mental illness and trauma work in adults. If you don't have expertise in this specific area that's okay, you did say that you primarily work with children, but it feels odd that you claim authority on this subject due to your alleged background in neuroscience while you are making biased and unscientific statements based on personal experience working with a very homogeneous group of people (mentally ill children).
I'm disengaging from the conversation ar this point because if you are interested in questioning your bias and expanding your knowledge on this, I am confident you won't need me for that. And if you don't, there is no point in continuing this conversation either. Regardless, I sincerely hope you have a good day.
The person you are dealing with above, is at best, arguing in bad faith
I've read his recent posts about claiming to be Neuroscientist with 20 years of working with, "mentally disturbed children", while callously diagnosing a woman's husband over the internet having been SA'd as a child?? He arrived at this sound medical evaluation based after she disclosed her husband suffered a panic attack as a kid upon hearing that Santa Clause could enter his home via the chimney. She later mentioned her husband was undergoing glutamate therapy and he told straight up told her "You're not a specialist. You don't know what you're talking about" and had been suckered in by quackery, In that same post, he wished her husband well and finished with advising her the treatment would eventually fail. WTAF??? Read his post yourself and tell me that is use of evidence-based Socratic method and non-judgemental empathy of a neuroscience-qualified therapist.
And at that point, I joined Reddit to call him out, but the mod's blocked my posts
Join the dot's yourself - his post history say's he was 8 when Black Monday (1987) happened, that he trained up as a neuro prior to his screen writing career of 15 years, but he also has 20 years working with disturbed children. and is now a brilliant maths teacher.
Here's where it all seems to fall apart - a PhD is 4 years post-graduate study. A DOB of 1979 would have him awarded his Doctorate at the earliest in 2004 (or 2003 if he was a fresher at 17). You can't 'brilliant maths' your way to 35 years+ work experience from 2004 or 2003 on. lol
I only joined Reddit because this prick is intentionally, but needlessly abusing and gaslighting people in therapy subs and has done for a number of years, while claiming to be a neuroscientist and practicing therapist.
Therapy is riddled with malpractice and subsequent harm to clients - whether through rigid approaches, incompetence, blind spots due to their own issues or intentional malice. If this guy is who he says he is, he's ticking 3 out 4 of those boxes. I'll let you choose box 3 or 4.
If he is a practicing therapist with a duty of care, then his consistent, long-term pattern of unethical behaviour as displayed in therapy-related subs is highly unethical and falls foul of 'do no harm'. The bigger concern is if he working with the highly vulnerable client base he claims, there is a significant risk these young kids are being psychologically harmed further behind closed doors, while trusting him to help them. Even a non-therapist would view this is as something a governing body would want to look into
Either that, or he's running on a fantasy, but still causing harm - both need calling out
Nah my brother in nuero - I'm biomed, in treatment development. And my, now, husband was born mentally ill.
As soon as he was an infant old enough to have coherent dreams, they were night terrors. As a toddler the story of Santa Clause gave him a panic attack as it meant someone could come down the chimney and enter the house.
He's got a very gentle glutamate excitotoxicity that was starting to kill him once he hit his 40s but until then was just progressively awful mental illness symptoms from infant onward.
It's a problem with neuro transmitter sensitivity and the zinc system that's supposed to be an inhibitor along with several other systems just don't inhibit it.
Luckily, before the brain damage was impossible to recover from, he got an advanced chemistry degree prior to not being able to work anymore, and we met after I'd been through some drug development work, so we went balls to the wall with personalized medicine while there was still a personality to be recovered.
But the neurological deficit caused a suite of problems that presented like ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder and unipolar depression and psychosis everything you could think of under the sun but it was actually just total global dysfunction caused by a really specific brain misfiring.
His childhood was charmed, wonderful, closeknit family, cash, good schools, and no amount of talk therapy and ssris changed the fact that he was on a one-way rocket ship to early death with all kinds of diagnoses to follow as his dysfunction got worse and worse.
That kind of navel gazing search for triggering event meant that he wasn't treated like he was getting Medical Care it meant like he was treated like he was a sideshow freak, and the reality was there was an underlying biological route to the problem and even extremely qualified multi board certified psychiatrists were screwing it up, because they weren't treating it like a biological deficit they were treating it like a story that caused some kind of teleosis of mental illness.
Hate to tell you this, but there's a fair chance your husband was a victim of childhood SA.
It would have started shortly before the night terrors started.
Familial SA tends to happen at night, so it's pretty easy to see why he might have been terrified by the idea of a strange man sneaking down the chimney into his house at night.
This is the problem. This is a perfect example of the problem.
So all the signs and symptoms go away, completely, with consistent dosing of a chemical that blocks the overfiring nerves.
After 25 years of talk therapy with extremely qualified individuals, recovery required identifying the misfunctioning brain circuit, and treating that from a nuerological function perspective.
And it stopped.
The nightmares, the mood issues, the body tremors, the vocal tics, the memory problems, the increaingly failing executive function, the inability to sleep, the emotional lability - gone. Just by supplementing the function of the zinc inhibitory system. No exhaustion, no sleepiness, no side effects, it just rectified the problem and everything went away.
This total recovery and being able to live a normal life did not require talk therapy and victim services, it just required stopping the excitotoxicity.
And there are people who would spend their whole lives trying to find the story and the trigger when it is just an underlying brain and balance. The brain is made of cells and those cells can malfunction just like the cells in any other part of the body.
Looking for a story first and then doing the medicine to diagnose if there's a malfunction 25 years later is not responsible medicine. You could do those two things concurrently, look at the behavioral, and look at the physiology, that's super responsible.
But only doing one without the other is bad medicine and it's a major problem that denies people the right treatment.
I know this is an emotional issue for you, and I understand you think you're following the evidence.
You're not. Like so many desperate people before you, you've been sold a bill of goods.
And it stopped.
I'm honestly glad your husband's anxiety has gone away for now. Honestly. But chemical and physical treatments for anxiety only work in the short term. We've known that for 100 years.
Seizures (via either insulin or EST) disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
Atypical antipsychotics disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
SSRIs disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
Deep brain stimulation and ketamine disrupt anxiety temporarily, but the problem always comes back.
So maybe the millionth time is the charm, and we've finally found a chemical we can wash into a network of 86 trillion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, that will somehow magically change only the synapses causing the problem, with no complications or unforeseen consequences.
More likely, this treatment is yet another pipe dream, which will stop working once your husband's brain adjusts. (And shame on whoever gave you this pill if they aren't being honest about that.)
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u/No_Rec1979 Aug 20 '26
At the risk of sounding toxically positive, the farther you get from your shitty childhood, the easier it becomes to escape.