By Bobby Shriver

Is mental illness caused by childhood trauma? It turns out that the early traumatic experiences you dealt with as a child can actually have a lasting impact on your life as you come of age. But these experiences can manifest themselves in adulthood as more than just difficult memories. For some people, childhood trauma can disrupt normal brain development and even be the precursor to eventual mental health disorders later in life.

How Does Childhood Trauma Affect the Brain?

Exactly how can childhood trauma cause mental illness? To answer this, you must first understand the connection between childhood trauma and your brain. When you experience trauma as a child, your developing brain can physically change in various ways.

For starters, childhood trauma can cause your developing brain to overemphasize the neural pathways of its regions associated with survival, reports the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at UT Health San Antonio’s Salud America!. Over time, this reduces the neural connections in the thinking area of the brain, limiting your learning and reasoning abilities. Ongoing trauma can also further weaken any remaining thinking pathways as it strengthens the survival pathways, making your ability to cope with adversity as a child all the more difficult.

As your childhood brain is rewired for surviving danger, it can also have a hard time filtering out sensory experiences, shares ISP Fostering. Consequently, your sensory system gets easily overloaded, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and unsafe. Childhood trauma can also limit your developing brain’s ability to regulate emotions, leading to challenges in expressing or managing your feelings during stressful or difficult situations (also known as emotional dysregulation). All these effects on your brain can make you susceptible to eventually developing a mental illness caused by childhood trauma.

How Does Childhood Trauma Affect Mental Health?

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), more than two-thirds of children report experiencing at least one traumatic event by age 16. Such traumatic events occurring in childhood can include:

• School or community violence
• Bullying
• Life-threatening illness
• Serious accidents
• Physical, psychological, or sexual abuse
• Sudden or violent loss of a loved one
• Neglect
• Witnessing or experiencing domestic violence
• National disasters
• Physical or sexual assault

When you consider the defining experiences of childhood trauma and their harmful effects on brain development, the question “Can childhood trauma cause mental illness?” becomes clearer. Childhood trauma not only profoundly affects your mental health, but it also increases your likelihood of developing a mental health disorder in adulthood by up to threefold. According to NeuroscienceNews.com, the risk of developing borderline personality disorder can increase up to 15 times for those who have experienced childhood trauma.

Studies of the life experiences of adult twins have also helped to affirm the link between childhood trauma and mental illness. Because twins have the same genetic makeup and are raised together in the same family, they can help researchers better understand the environmental factors — such as childhood trauma — that led to differences in their mental health outcomes.

One study by Molecular Psychiatry analyzed a particular set of twins in which one experienced a serious accident as a teenager while the other did not. Consequently, their lives looked very different in adulthood, with the twin in the accident struggling with cognitive difficulties and major depressive episodes. In a similar study by JAMA Psychiatry, over 25,000 twins were analyzed in Sweden. Researchers found that twins who dealt with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) often had mental health disorders in adulthood, and the odds for mental health disorders increased substantially after multiple ACEs or sexual abuse.

Mental Health Disorders Associated With Childhood Trauma

When you experience trauma as a child, it doesn’t necessarily take long for mental health disorders to develop. Some children can struggle with a mental illness right away, such as acute stress disorder (ASD), reactive attachment disorder (RAD), or various adjustment disorders, says Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

If your childhood trauma is left untreated and maladaptive coping mechanisms like self-harm or substance abuse enter the picture in response, you may develop further mental illnesses in adulthood, such as:

• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Depression
• Bipolar disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Borderline personality disorder
• Anxiety disorder

Let’s take a look at some of the most common mental health disorders caused by childhood trauma that you can experience long-term:

• PTSD and Childhood Trauma
  According to the National Center for PTSD, studies indicate that up to 15% of girls and 6% of boys who’ve experienced childhood trauma eventually develop PTSD. Children associated with the most severe traumas — abuse, violent crimes, disasters, or a friend’s suicide, for example — tend to have the highest levels of PTSD symptoms.

• Childhood Trauma and Depression
  We know that poor emotional regulation skills and unhealthy coping mechanisms can be the result of childhood trauma. These attributes alone can increase your risk of developing depression as an adult. But childhood trauma can also disrupt your body’s ability to manage stress and even prevent you from forming healthy relationships with others, leading to eventual isolation. All these challenges combined make your likelihood of developing depression later in life even higher.

• Childhood Trauma and Anxiety
  When you experience trauma as a child, your brain shifts into survival mode. This in turn can cause you to become hypervigilant to your surroundings and other people’s reactions. You may even develop higher stress reactivity. As a result, you’re more prone to struggling with constant worry, recurring panic attacks, fear of being judged in social settings, or other forms of anxiety disorder long-term.

Heal Mental Illness Caused By Childhood Trauma at The Meadows

If a traumatic event happens to a child, they become vulnerable to many of the challenges and mental health disorders we’ve discussed in this article. However, early intervention in the form of professional treatment and support can be key to preventing this trauma from causing serious damage to their long-term physical, mental, and emotional development.

But if you’re reading this as an adult with a history of childhood trauma, know that the fallout from your past doesn’t have to continue negatively impacting your life. Healing is possible. At The Meadows, we utilize trauma-informed care to directly address the underlying childhood trauma responsible for your anxiety, depression, PTSD, or other mental health disorders. By healing the root causes of your struggles, you can overcome your mental illness and learn how to cope with difficult memories in a healthier way. To learn more, contact our team today.