bird-cum:

star-anise:

I’m avoiding the thing about Trump’s family separation policy as much as possible because it literally makes me want to melt down in a rage the moment I think about it almost at all, and as a Canadian there’s an incredibly limited amount I can do when I have to keep my own precarious mental health functioning

but I just want you to know that a lot of the field of Attachment Theory in psychology began after WWII, when psychologists examined the physical and psychological health of children sent away from their parents for their own “safety”

and what we found about the psychological results of broken child-caregiver attachment has led us to conclude that it is literally MORE HUMANE to leave families intact in refugee camps in warzones, than to separate the children from their parents, even if those children are sent to the best of all possible environments.

Speaking as a fucking psychologist I just want you to know that if you want to fuck someone up FOR FUCKING LIFE, the BEST possible way to do it, is to abruptly separate them from the adults who love and care for them. For maximum fuckery do it before the age of 3, 5 is pretty damn good at fucking them up for life too, but honestly any time before adulthood is pretty effective. You will fuck them up in a way we just DON’T know how to heal yet. You don’t just leave them catastrophically more at risk for mental illness, learning disorders, addictions, abuse, and future trauma, you also put them at much higher risk of things like diabetes, heart attack, and suicide.

and then I thought about what kind of environments those kids ARE being sent into and I need to throw up now