My life has been shaped by trauma. My first contact with mental health services was at the age of 12 or 13. Although I didn’t have the words to explain what had happened to me, after years of silence, and of feeling that I didn’t have a voice, my story was pouring out. I was closed down with medication and changes of topic. I still do not have the words to tell my story. Twenty years earlier, my mum’s trauma had led her to sectioning, ECT and a lifetime of contact with mental health services.
I believe that our lives would have unfolded very differently if the response from services had been trauma-informed - if staff had been supported to understand and engage with our pain - if we were encouraged to tell our stories instead of being shut down with looks, words, drugs and ECT. The more I learn about trauma informed approaches the more convinced I have become that these approaches could lead to a seismic shift in how psychiatric services are delivered.
Nearly thirty years on from my first contact with mental health services, I’ve been lucky enough to partner with Beth Filson, Sarah Clement and Angela Kennedy to write a paper that explores how we might bring trauma informed approaches to the UK. It’s called “Trauma-informed mental healthcare in the UK: what is it and how can we further its development” (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/...08/MHRJ-01-2015-0006). The broad aim of the paper is to describe and explain something of trauma-informed approaches in mental health and explore how such approaches can become more prevalent across the UK. Specifically, we explore the prevalence of trauma, the link between trauma and mental health, the ways in which the psychiatric system can retraumatise both staff and survivors / service users, the broad principles of trauma-informed approaches, the potential benefits of trauma-informed approaches, their application in mental health, the evidence on their effectiveness, the extent to which such approaches have reached the UK, and the barriers and facilitators to their implementation.
In her recent book chapter, Beth Filson, a trauma survivor, writes: “A doctor once pointed out to me – in the face of what he considered to be my obvious denial – all the behavioural indications associated with my particular brand of madness. To him, my self-injury was a ‘symptom’; my panic was a ‘symptom’; my hearing voices and seeing people who were not there were all ‘symptoms’. When he proclaimed, not without disgust, ‘You have a mental illness’, I’d responded, ‘I thought I had stories to tell’. Beth goes on to explain why a trauma-informed response is essential: “The answers we form to the most basic of all questions, ‘Why?’, is the first step out of senselessness … In part, healing happens in the re-storying of our lives”.
To support the continued expansion of trauma-informed approaches, Beth Filson, Sarah Clement, Angela Kennedy and myself have produced the paper on trauma-informed approaches in the UK which you can find here:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/...08/MHRJ-01-2015-0006
Beth, Sarah and myself are trauma survivors whilst Angela Kennedy has been working to bring trauma-informed approaches to mental health services in her area for over a decade.
We warmly welcome any comments that people may have. I can be contacted on asweeney@sgul.ac.uk
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Filson B (2016) The Haunting Can End: Trauma-informed approaches in healing from abuse and diversity. In Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies.
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