Health Report continued.
We did a long series of interviews on this Transition The Grove Hour with local mental health service providers. I don’t know about you. How did you find them? Personally I found them very moving to listen to a whole range of people who are involved for caring for us if we become mentally ill.
It can happen to any of us can’t it. It’s not something we want but our mental health is very precious and sometimes it can be fragile.
Life throws some very hard knocks at some of us and they can come out of the blue. Has this every happened to you? I know it has happened to me and when I think about it is seems like an amazing miracle that I’ve recovered that I’ve got the wonderful life I have today.
Psychological trauma can knock us about dreadfully. It is called a complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now some experts in mental health are saying that about two-thirds of the patients who come to the attention of the mental health sysem suffered sexual or physical abuse as children. If emotional abuse or neglect are also included you’re left with the great majority of all patients who have some significant childhood trauma. There is an explosion of research in the past 2 years showing that adversity in childhood correlates strongly with brain development and later psychological health in childhood adolescence and adulthood.
The significance of experiencing all that trauma of living with it often for years is often overlooked. Yet it is the bigger picture of the individual’s story.
Now there is a new trauma-informed approach to care with training in the recognition of trauma. A trauma-informed service is by its very nature – no matter if your trauma is little or huge – a service that fundamentally listens to you and believes you.
When I read things like this I always like to ask the question: What does this mean for us here locally in the upper Kedron Brook valley community? Is this something we can do anything about? Does it affect us?
Well of course the answer is: Yes. We can do a personal audit of the major trauma events of our life: Have we dealt with them all? Have we grieved? Have we shared about them and been listened to? Have we received help to sort out the damage the pain the anger the fear? What on-going consequences are we still living with?
Is this something we can do locally? Well we have trained psychologists working locally available to us and we can go to the doctor and get a referral. Quite a bit of the cost of visits can be covered through Medicare. We can ask if the psychologists can work with us using a trauma-informed approach. This sort of approach isn’t about doing tests or getting labelled with some sort of psychological condition.
What about our friends and families? Are we able to share with any of them about the trauma we once experienced? Would they listen? Would they be there for us? Certainly the best of friends will be. This is certainly something we can do locally.
It is a sort of mental housekeeping isn’t it? Not holding on to painful dark memories but actively seeking ways to get help with them and free yourself from them
Lighten our spirits. None of us deserve to carry past trauma. Let’s be kind to ourselves and each other locally and be part of the healing.