#devolopmental psychology

[outstanding-quotes]

“One of the things that’s really driven me in my work with children and abuse is you see how the general public have so much empathy and gushing sentimentality for abused children and these poor little three, four, five, six-year-olds. By their twenties and thirties, they’re alcoholic and they’re addicted to heroin. And suddenly the public have turned off their empathy switch, and we’ve forgotten the developmental roots of that. And so, as I moved in my own career away from child and adolescent psychiatry into adults’ addictions, what became patently clear was that these patients in their thirties, forties, fifties with alcohol and opioid addictions were the same cohort of little four, five, six-year-olds that I’d cared for in the past.”

Dr. Ben Sessa, in an interview from How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan