Adoption is frequently portrayed as a beautiful story of rescue, gratitude and new beginnings. But for adoptees themselves, the reality can often be far more complicated, as mental health struggles are all too common among this part of our population.
Louise Browne along with Kansas City's Sarah Reinhardt co-host the podcast "Adoption: The Making of Me," which highlights the stories of adoptees.
"The mainstream media knows about adoption through the adoption industry, through parents who adopt, through political sides left and right, through commercials, through whatever you see on TV on the Hallmark moments, and so we're really trying to get the voices of the unheard out there — adoptees and birth mothers," Browne told KCUR's Up To Date.
Studies have shown that adoptees are as much as four times more likely to attempt suicide, and many of them grapple with complex PTSD and other mental health challenges. The separation between a mother and her child after adoption is often referred to as the "primal wound."
"You're taking a baby, you're severing a baby from its mother and its history, its DNA origins, centuries of history, and placing them (with) some random — and it is very random — strangers and expecting them to assimilate and adapt into a family they don't belong in," Reinhardt said.
Reinhardt and Browne joined Up To Date along with Gretchen Sisson, the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
- Sarah Reinhardt, co-host of "Adoption: The Making of Me"
- Louise Browne, co-host of "Adoption: The Making of Me"
- Gretchen Sisson, author of "Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood"
Disclosure: Sarah Reinhardt works at KCUR as the volunteer and events coordinator.
