In recent years, the western psychological world has become fascinated with ‘ACEs’ – adverse childhood experiences. The original study to explore the concept of ACEs was carried out by Felitti and his associates in 1998; a large-scale analysis of the effects of a range of childhood stressors upon both mental and physical health in later life. They found that people experiencing a high number of such events in childhood were far more likely to suffer from stress-related illness in later life.
Those with the highest ACE scores died, on average, 20 years earlier. Stress-coping through addiction to both legal and illegal substances was found to be a significant feature of this trajectory. One example is a raft of subsequent research which found significant positive correlation between compulsive eating and high ACE scores.
Trauma awareness and adverse childhood experiences
In the mid-2000s, film maker and activist James Redford, son of actor Robert Redford, came across an article disseminating the Felitti ACEs study and determined that the findings should be raised more prominently within the public eye. The vehicle he created was the film Resilience: the biology of stress and the science of hope which has now been widely distributed across the western world.
Redford compares the constant stress that some children live under as comparable to arriving home every night in the knowledge that they are going to have to cope with a bear in the living room. He comments “day after day, those chemicals – the adrenaline, cortisol, the process of high sugar … this continual exposure to stress wears the body down”.
The wider concept of ACEs is complex. Basic screening programmes undertaken simply to label individuals with ‘high ACE scores’ with no plan for sustained supportive action are likely to do more harm than good. However, problems can be surmounted by a range of measures, for example positive response programmes for trauma-aware practices in schools and law enforcement, public information that helps individuals to understand how their bodies and brains work, and most of all, to prevent the occurrence of ACEs in the lives of children.
Performing artists and ‘ACEs’
I’ve been researching various aspects of ACEs for a few years now. My reading in this area brought me to some fascinating research which suggests a positive correlation between high ACE scores and creativity. In particular, performing artists with high ACEs scores tend to be more intensively creative than those who experienced secure childhoods.
Paula Thompson and Victoria Jacque found a link between shame and fantasy in dancers. They theorised that fantasy became a stress-coping strategy. In later, larger scale research they discovered that performing artists with high ACE scores were more able to enter what is known as a ‘flow state’, losing themselves in their performance. Chiraag Mittal found that people with high ACE scores are statistically more likely to lack impulse inhibition, and, while this may get them into trouble in school and with the law, it also appears to serve as a factor that enhances intensity of creative performance. Marie Forgeard found that the number of adverse childhood events reported by performers significantly predicts their breadth of creativity.
I consequently decided to carry out a very small study of my own. I purchased some 1970s teenage publications I recalled from my own childhood, and looked through the contents to identify those who most frequently appeared on the covers and were most prominently mentioned inside, of which there were 18. I then researched their life histories to the present.
Eight of those still living had never featured in the media with respect to addiction or mental health problems. Eight who had died, and two who were still living had all featured in later publicity relating to addiction, some explicitly citing emotionally disrupted childhoods as the trigger. Alcohol was named as the major source of substance abuse in five of these cases.
It must be noted that no definitive conclusions can be drawn from such a small sample and a weakly controlled methodology; however, there is still tentative evidence of a larger proportion of early death (44%) and/or addiction (56%) than would generally be expected in a sample drawn from the general public.
David Cassidy: a text-book case
One performer in particular appeared to be a textbook case of the high ACE performer, who had followed the route of a disrupted childhood into enhanced performance, addiction and early death. This was 1970s teen idol David Cassidy, who died aged 67 in 2017.
On Monday 11 June 2018, a TV programme aired in the US which followed Cassidy recording his last album Songs my father taught me, a tribute to his bipolar ‘debonair and dashing father’ who left his mother when Cassidy was only three and a half, and died an alcoholic at the age of 49. Cassidy reflected on his chequered childhood memories of his father, asserting that, despite the problems were present in their relationship, he still loved and missed him.
Cassidy came to fame very early in life, and when he came to write his life story, he detailed lifelong difficulty with relationships of all varieties, including a catalogue of abuse by agents and producers who had enticed him to sign exploitative contracts that gave him far less financial compensation from his work than he should have received. Poor mental and physical health and chaotic personal relationships in his later life meant that he died estranged from his family and many of his friends, leaving only $150,000.
Cassidy, drinking and dementia
Sadly, the documentary was marred by yet further exploitation. One of its themes was Cassidy’s concern that he was developing dementia due to memory difficulties that he had been experiencing. The programme followed his consultations with specialists. The final diagnosis was that his memory problems stemmed from chronic alcoholism, which he had been concealing in both public and private for much of his adult life.
The final consultation with the specialists was not broadcast, however. The way in which the information was communicated to the audience was via a conversation recorded by a journalist on her iPhone of a clearly ailing Cassidy.
It is unclear if Cassidy was aware that the content was going to be broadcast. Six months after his death, it gave rise to an explosion of lurid tabloid headlines; for example the Daily Mirror’s ‘David Cassidy admits he LIED about having dementia to cover up his drinking’.
Cassidy admitted to covering up his drinking in the recorded conversation, but whether or not he knew before diagnosis that it was his drinking that caused his memory problems was not at all clear. In fact what he actually says is “I did this to myself to cover up the sadness and the emptiness”.
Poignantly, on his first solo album, Cassidy included a song about a clown who sings and dances for others to hide his own pain, the words of which could be used as an anthem for performing artists and ACEs.
If one of the effects of a damaged childhood is to catapult a human being into public performances that others find compelling, how should the media and the public respond to this? In the absence of trauma-informed interactions, is such intense voyeurism, particularly in a networked society, one of the most sustained abuses of all? There are many such questions we need to ask ourselves, as evidence continues to emerge.
Trauma awareness in public life
Over a decade ago, it was revealed that the tabloid press paid journalists to engage in the hacking of celebrity phone messages. The final fall out was the forced withdrawal of one of the UK’s most popular tabloids, the News of the World.
Over the last month, a group of celebrities have given notice of their intention to sue another tabloid publication, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, alleging a far more a far more sophisticated regime of intrusion. Prince Harry is one of this cohort. And although his is not a standard trajectory into the show business world, his childhood, like Cassidy’s, followed a trajectory of significant adverse events, despite material privilege. Sadly, the media continues to pick over the ashes in the Netflix series The Crown.
Perhaps we should not only be applying ‘trauma awareness’ to those with whom we personally interact, but also to people in the public eye; becoming more aware of the harm we do by ‘dabbling our fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’. Is it, as tragic celebrity Caroline Flack proposed, now time to create a more considerate, less exploitative media environment, not least in the wake of recent high profile suicides?
