Treating trauma is a community problem, not personal.,
A woman is beaten in the United States every 15 seconds. Society pays the cost in mental health budgets. courts , cops, corrections, substance abuse, and children’ services. The real social cost of trauma has been well known to people who work in those systems for years, but there is no consensus about what to do, or how to build political support, for treating trauma.
treating trauma is essential. People like Cheryl Sharp and Shery Mead are bringing the role of treating trauma in mental health to the forefront, nationwide. Shery
Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can create profound and lasting changes, or humiliate and destroy us. But they only have that power if we can feel.
A person with frozen emotions is not moved by language. She hears the words, but they float around somewhere “out there”. Syllables strung together, hardly meaningful. Syllables like stones bouncing off a lake.
The closed self is like a lake covered in hardened steel. Below the cold metal, nothing is alive, because nothing can breathe. The deep soul within becomes static. Locked in a cavern of darkness, unmoved, unmovable.
Recently, I got “beat up” by the language police in a bloody Facebook fight. I was charged with:
1. Using the term “SMI” to refer to the “Seriously Mentally Ill” population.
2. Asserting that conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were “organic brain disorders,” different than situational issues such as trauma-based depression or stress-related anxiety.
The “language police,” aware of my personal history with traumas from hospitalizations and misdiagnoses, blasted me for my “hypocrisy,” and “holier than thou” attitude. Many people shared stories of having been traumatized by narrow-minded or inaccurate
Thirty-five years is too long to carry a wound that still hurts from time to time. I’m talking about my first experience as a “mental patient“ in 1977.
I’m determined to put that pain behind me this year.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that only one person who treated me at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston was malicious. The rest just didn’t know how to treat me.
I Don’t Hate Well-Meaning People Who Just Don’t Know
The staff was following a treatment plan, and what they knew
The day I was invited to write regularly for Robert Whitaker’s website, Madinamerica.com, alongside the best mental health writers in the country, I felt like I’d been called up to the Major Leagues.
But my first thought was to make sure I did not confuse happiness and mania.
I felt honored, recognized, and very proud. But 30 years after my last manic attack, I still worry that sudden flattering happiness might lead to exhilaration, then mania.
So before I raced to the laptop to start my first blog for him, or tell my friends the wonderful
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