The Vagus Nerve and Mental Health
Dr Theresa Larkin
is an academic in Graduate Medicine at the University of Wollongong and joins Jim to discuss
the role vagus nerves play
in our physical and mental health
.
Photo:
3DMEDISPHERE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRA
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Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri Photo: SUPPLIED We inherit our genes but can we inherit trauma? There's no doubt we can feel it but can the trauma of previous generations be expressed in our genetic code? How does a parent's experience of war, ethnic persecution, cultural oppression, state or domestic abuse manifest itself in their child? Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri from Monash University in Melbourne is an expert in transgenerational effects, looking at how the lived experiences of one generation can shape those that follow. An Oxford scholar, Dr Camilleri talks to Mihi about the relationship between biology, psychology and our environment and what we can do to break the cycle of transgenerational trauma. Photo: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
The science of transgenerational trauma, epigenetics and hope for healing
Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri studies epigenetics and the transgenerational effects of trauma. Photo: SUPPLIED Do we inherit the effects of trauma physically from past generations? Do parents' experiences of war, ethnic persecution, cultural oppression, state or domestic abuse have lasting effects, manifested in their children? There's no doubt we can feel it, but can the trauma of previous generations actually be coded into the bodies of their children? New research is beginning to shed light on this. Dr Tara-Lyn Camilleri, an Oxford scholar and now a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, specialises in epigenetics - the interplay between our environments, lived experiences and how our genes are expressed. She talked to Mihingarangi Forbes about the biology and what that tells us about breaking cycles of transgenerational trauma. In a wider sense, "transgenerational trauma is when the effects of trauma in one generation ripple into the next generation, so it can shape us in a few key ways - biologically socially psychologically and culturally" Camilleri says. "So psychologically, if someone's experienced trauma it can effect how they parent, how they regulate emotion, and how safe their environment is in general - all will shape a child's development. Culturally trauma can disrupt people connection to culture, language, history, land, which can carry through generations if healing doesn't happen. So all of these things are constantly interacting with one another to produce these outcomes. "Biologically, stress can change how our bodies regulate things like hormones and immunity and those changes can be passed on sometimes through what we call epigenetic mechanisms - when we feel unsafe it can activate stress pathways in the body that alter how certain genes are expressed." Epigenetics is not changes to the DNA and genes itself, but changes to other biochemical tags that affect how DNA code is used, or to surrounding proteins. "I've described it as the directors notes on a script - these notes may tell the actors which lines to emphasise or downplay, but they're not changing the script itself," Camilleri says. For example, the fight or flight response is how the body continually responds to either real or perceived threats. And "this is when we start to get into the realm of phenotypic plasticity - it's a fundamental process in biology - it doesn't get a lot of attention, but things like stress or diet, these environmental conditions, can change our bodies, they change our neuroplasticity - the change the neurons in our brain, and they can change a whole host of other things, and that can induce these epigenetic changes." Genetics itself could mean a predisposition to experiencing stress in particular ways, including physically. Epigenetics can then "act like a volume dial" turning up or down those genes effects, and can be influenced by our parents experiences or our early childhood experiences. The effects of phenotypic plasticity can also be seen in the animal world, Camilleri says. For example what a honeybee is fed will determine if it becomes a worker or a queen. Some of those phenotypic changes can then be passed on to descendants, for example the body of stickleback fish can change to make it more difficult for predators to eat them. And this result can sometimes last for many generations when it is then cued by environmental factors like nutrients and hormones that regulate those responses. Camilleri says her own research with fruit flies found different nutrition and diet changes could result in different effects for different generations. One diet fed to both parents and their children resulted in the parents living longer but the offspring living shorter lives, whereas a different diet of more protein resulted in both grandmothers and granddaughters producing more offspring. The effects of transgenerational trauma can skip generations, and there are also actions we can take to mediate its effects, Camilleri says. "It's not always set in stone ... when we look at this research we don't see what we would call very predictable effects - it can change all the time. These epigenetic changes are what we call plastic, so they don't necessarily have to be permanent, and they are changing all the time throughout our lifetime all of the time. "So there are several things we can do to mediate it, to ensure that we might be able to break the cycle - but certainly even without intervention, our genetics are always talking to our environment. Our biology and our environment are always interacting with our social systems and our culture, so it's such a complicated mix of things that it's not always set in stone." Photo: (Pixabay Public Domain) Studies have found that how much of a parents' experiences result in factors affecting their children depends on which parent was affected, she says. Including one landmark study of cortisol (a stress hormone) in the children of holocaust survivors with PTSD. It found the children of mothers who were holocaust survivors were more likely to have cortisol dysregulation that made it more difficult to calm down from a stress response, compared to children of fathers who were holocaust survivors. "They are more predisposed to these baseline cortisol levels not being able to return to normal and keeping the body in ... a more prolonged stress state." Research has also found that breaking the cycle is more successful when the onus does not just fall on the individual, she says. "There are personal strategies. Obviously therapy, seeing a psychologist, building supportive relationships and learning to regulate our stress and emotion, it definitely helps and it's definitely very valuable - and that is where the emphasis is now, in society, it's sort of on the individual. "And I think what is changing is that we're realising that those personal strategies that we can do are most effective when other solutions address wider systems that people live in, so that means tackling the social, the economic and the environmental conditions that keep stress or inequity high... large-scale events, war, colonialisation. "Supporting things like cultural-led healing, community-led things by the people. Especially for these wide large-scale events - the people who've experienced these they need to lead these. Those voices need to be heard and listened to, so that it restores this sense of connection and identity and acknowledgement. Because it's about people feeling safe within the systems that they live in. "So when we change things at those broader levels we can reduce the load on individuals, and create those conditions where those individual strategies will be more likely to effect recovery and therefore affect subsequent generations."
RNZ News
3 days ago
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'Silent crisis': Asian people missing out on mental health support
Asian Family Services commissioned the mental health and well-being report. Photo: 123RF Asian people in Christchurch are missing out on mental health support because of language and cultural barriers, as part of a "silent crisis" of worsening national statistics, community leaders say. A mental health and well-being report commissioned by Asian Family Services published in July found that 57 percent of respondents were at risk of depression , which was a 12 percent increase on the figure reported in 2021. Asian Family Services chief executive Kelly Feng said 69 percent of Korean respondents and 63 percent of Indians showed signs of depression, while life satisfaction among all Asians had fallen by 11 percent since 2021. "These findings point to a silent crisis," she said. "Asian communities are navigating mental health challenges, discrimination, disconnection, often without adequate support. We urgently need culturally responsive interventions in schools, workplaces and healthcare settings." Kelly Feng Photo: RNZ / Yiting Lin Asian Community Transformation Trust founder Allen Hou said people's struggles were compounded by a lack of bilingual mental health professionals in Christchurch. Canterbury's Asian population had grown by 30 percent since 2018, but support services lagged behind other regions, he said. "Even if people have that knowledge and want to access help, that's when they face the common challenges we know of language and culture - 'I can't speak my heart language to describe my issues and my emotions and therefore I can't engage and utilise this service fully'," he said. Hou estimated there were only a handful of mental health professionals in Christchurch who spoke Asian languages. "We're doing our best to advocate for the community about the needs and encourage them to consider that as a career path even for their children. We try to meet with counselling students who are Asians and just encourage them in this space," he said. Allen Hou from Asian Community Transformation Trust. Photo: RNZ / Anna Sargent Hou founded the Christchurch-based charitable trust in 2021. The group works with organisations, schools and GP practices to help bridge service gaps. "Since we started we heard continuously from organisations in Christchurch that service people, council and other spaces that they've never come across an organisation like us. It makes us think we're onto something that no-one has been trying to meet in Christchurch," Hou said. Hou said stigma and shame around poor mental health remained strong in some Asian cultures. While Christchurch recorded the highest life satisfaction of any city in the report, Feng said it also reported higher than average barriers to accessing mental health services, echoing Hou's experience on the ground. Feng said calls to Asian Family Services' Asian Helpline had tripled since Covid-19, rising from about 3000 annually to about 10,000. The organisation's report was based on an online survey of 1016 Asian adults in May, funded by the Ethnic Communities Development Fund, which is administered by the Ministry for Ethnic Communities. The report was the third of its kind, with earlier versions published in 2020 and 2021 . Feng said discrimination remained a significant problem, with more than one in five people experiencing race-based bias. "Only 56.5 percent Asians felt like they were accepted by the community. It's really challenging for people feeling like they are just not part of the society," she said. Hou, who immigrated from Taiwan to New Zealand aged 11 in 1998, said moving countries was often stressful. "At my age the main struggle was language, the sense of being able to make friends and understanding what was happening at schools. For my parents it's different things like medical systems, for example in Taiwan where we're from we just go to hospital, but in New Zealand you have to find a GP and everything goes from there," he said. University of Auckland social and community health senior lecturer Dr Vartika Sharma said 75 percent of ethnic minority communities in New Zealand were born overseas. "They might've come from countries where mental health is still quite stigmatised so they don't have the vocabulary to talk about mental health. That all becomes quite challenging in terms of acknowledging it's a problem in the first place," she said. Sharma said a lack of high-quality data on the mental health of Asian and Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African women and girls in New Zealand also made it harder to design effective services. "It's a point of worry because it's a population that's expected to grow, and we don't want them to be invisible," she said. Stats NZ projections show Asians will make up about 26 percent of New Zealand's population by 2043, up from 16 percent in 2018. If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
