Abstract
This paper provides a medical sociological approach to understand post-placement adoption functioning. Placing the adoptee’s experience as central, this chapter presents a theory of complex adoption trauma that emphasizes the significance of adoption status as a social determinant of distress and illness. The study offers a non-psychocentric, biosocial relational approach to understanding adoptee health and wellbeing, including adoption suicidality, attempts, and completed suicides. Drawing on middle-range sociological theory of family systems, observations, and life histories, the study relies upon recent studies in epigenetics, traumatology, neuroscience and adverse childhood experiences to provide an integrative clinical approach to conceptualize complex adoption trauma.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Traumatology, Relinquishment, Displacement, Assimilation, Adoption, Adoptee, Mental Health, Sucide
