Charles L. Whitfield

Whitfield taught at Rutgers University and is a best-selling author known for his books on the topics of general childhood trauma, childhood sexual abuse, and addiction recovery, including Healing the Child Within and Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects of Trauma.

Whitfield is recognized for his sixty published articles and fifteen published books. Some of his works are: Healing the Child Within (1987), Memory and Abuse (1995), and The Truth About Mental Illness (2004).

Work on childhood trauma

Whitfield was a part of the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study. Through this study, Whitfield and colleagues have been able to conclude that hallucinations do have an association with childhood trauma. Before this ACE study, medical professionals had already known that hallucinations can be tied to many mental illnesses and their severities such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dissociative-personality disorder. It was because of this study that Whitfield and his colleagues were able to take a step back and see what type of relationship with trauma one had as a child. These traumas included abuse (sexual, physical, and/or emotional), parental separation or divorce, witnessing and/or experiencing domestic violence, living with people who abuse substances, who have been or are currently incarcerated, and who are mentally ill as a child. This helped show that having violent childhood experiences led to an increased risk of intimate partner violence. These criteria were then used to score the ACEs, which range from 0 to 8, to see where one could be a potential hallucinator.

This study was a collaboration between the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente's Health Appraisal Center (HAC) in San Diego. The purpose of this study was to observe and assess the impact of one's adulthood when experiencing one or multiple traumatic childhood experiences and to determine if this impacts health behaviors and outcomes and health care utilization. The study was then approved by Kaiser Permanente's institutional review board, along with Emory University, the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of Protection from Research Risks. The pool of people selected for this study was chosen from the HAC. Those that were chosen were then evaluated at the HAC and had to complete a questionnaire, which included detailed health history, health-related behaviors, psychosocial evaluations, and medical reviews. Two weeks after taking the questionnaire at HAC, the people involved in their study were mailed home an ACE study questionnaire. The ACE study questionnaire was used to ask those involved about their adverse childhood experiences in detail, family and household dysfunction, and their health-related behaviors from their adolescence to their adult life.

This study concluded 54% of women and 46% of men. The mean age of the participants was 57 years old. 75% of the participants were White, 39% of the participants were college graduates, 36% of participants had some college education but had not completed schooling, 18% of participants graduated high school, and 7% of participants had not graduated high school. The adverse childhood experiences that were being asked about were described as emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, a battered mother, household substance abuse, mental illness in household, parental separation or divorce, and an incarcerated household member. When these participants were answering these questions, they had to answer them by the conflict tactics scale (CTS). The response categories concluded "never", "once or twice", "sometimes", "often", and "very often". Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse were defined by CTS questions along with the questions about having a battered mother. The rest were answered by yes or no. In the result of this ACE study, women had the higher adverse childhood experiences scores than men in every category except physical abuse. Yet, when it came to being asked if the participants had any issues with substance abuse, men had a higher rate of using substance abuse. Same thing with those who have had adverse childhood experiences and have had a history of hallucinations. Men have had a higher rate than women despite only having a higher percentage with only one ACE category.