The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study connected adolescent experiences with triggering PTSD in adulthood.
By PTSDJournal Staff
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a punishing psychological condition that most frequently diagnosed in combat military personnel and adult victims of criminal attack and automobile accidents. Researchers have focused on the link between PTSD and child abuse and its connection to medical and psychological problems that surface in adulthood.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study conducted in 1998 is considered a groundbreaking piece of research. It is based on an investigation of 17,000 patients by Vincent J. Felitti, M.D., of Kaiser Permanente, and Robert F. Anda, M.D., M.S., of the Centers for Disease Control. The ACE study concluded that childhood exposure to physical and mental abuse and trauma contributes to a statistically significant measure of adult PTSD, increased illness, and earlier death. {The ACE study can be found at http://acestudy.org.)
The life and death of Leonard Belzer is a “classic case” of ACE study research.
On August 1, 2014, Belzer, 73, younger brother of TV actor Richard Belzer (Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), jumped to his death from the roof of his 16th-floor New York City apartment building. Neighbors said Belzer had always been in a good mood and loved talking about movies until the 2012 death of his wife, award-winning Sesame Street director Emily Squires. “He never quite recovered,” said one neighbor. “He was still friendly after she passed, but he just seemed more subdued.”
Did her death set off PTSD? Or were the seeds sown early in his life?
In 1968, when Belzer was 27, his father committed suicide. Was Leonard Belzer’s own suicide a clear-cut case of PTSD gnawing its way into his psyche decades earlier and setting the example for the terrible decision to take his own life?
In a joint 1993 interview in People Magazine, Leonard and Richard Belzer went into detail about their unhappy childhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Our mother [who died in 1964] didn’t know how to love her sons appropriately,” Leonard said in the interview. “She always had some rationale for hitting us.”
Exposure to such behavior at a young age can lead to damaging results later in life. Recognizing the correlation is why the ACE Study was such a breakthrough, according to Felitti. Next, he said the findings need integration into standard medical, psychotherapeutic practice. The factors that trigger suicide can be numerous, complex, and hard to understand. Belzer was never diagnosed with PTSD, but he did experience several early and later life traumas that, taken together, may have led to PTSD.
Knowing what we know about childhood trauma, did abuse set Leonard Belzer on a path to later committing suicide? We may never know for sure, but Felitti explained that is precisely why the ACE Study on medical and psychological treatment is so important. “But remember,” he cautioned, “even the germ theory of disease took a long time to take hold.”