[Host, DEBORAH] BECKER: “… What do you make of how we look at toxicity for someone to decide that they are going to cut off ties with their family?
BRISCOE: Oh, it is a sensitive point in the PLACE community because many of our estranged parents have heard, “I’m leaving because you’re toxic.”
BECKER: Let’s just say PLACE is your group Parents Living After Child Estrangement. Okay.
BRISCOE: And it is not a clinical term. It’s not in the DSM-5 or any such. Toxic means unpleasant, jerk, any such thing.
And that’s … all well and good. There was a therapist featured in the New York Times article on this subject who said, Hey, if you’re going to consider coming to work with me, take this “how toxic is your family” assessment. And that’s not a thing. That’s no more valuable than an assessment you’d find in a grocery checkout line magazine somewhere.
And Whitney [Goodman, the other interviewee] talked about responsibility. This fellow with this “toxicity assessment” has a duty. People are going to think that’s legitimate because he’s the authority in the room. This is a logical fallacy, the appeal to authority, and it’s undermining us. The prevalence of that word is causing problems.
It’s really misuse of that word. I wish we could stick to clear clinical terms like the voicemail that said, “I had childhood trauma.”
Were you assessed? Did you have childhood trauma? Did you do a CAPS-5 [“Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale”] with a trained clinician? So the lines get blurred, and “toxic” is a good example of that.
BECKER: Whitney, what do you say? Are we misusing the word toxic here?
GOODMAN: I think the problem is there’s no agreement on a single definition for a lot of these things. Brian, you brought up childhood trauma. And I find that a lot of parents want to debate with me on the definition of trauma, of childhood abuse, of emotional abuse, that our definitions of these even clinical terms have really shifted so dramatically over the last several decades, that we have a lot of adults between age 20 and 40, saying this stuff happened to me.
**
Full stop.
I disagree with “…there’s no agreement on a single definition for a lot of these things.”
The clinical terms which should be our true north as we work with patients are defined. I regret that I did not get the opportunity to set the record straight. Dr. Coleman has pointed out that patients can report with some symptoms of trauma, for example, while actually being sub-threshold for a diagnosis. We simply call that “features of.” Having features of a disorder is not the same as having it. I suspect that we have a wave of trauma theft in the EAC community. It is the mental health equivalent of stolen valor.
