I am a former board member of the Kansas Consumer Advisory Council, Kansas’ Statewide Network of Mental Health Consumer, part of the civil rights movement of people. We are working on a project to build trauma informed care in the state of Kansas. This is the idea that most people who have been labeled with pychiatric diagnoses have been through overwhelming experiences that caused a loss of safety. These experiences can affect people far into the future and knowing about how to handle trauma can often drastically change how people perceive their difficulties.
I know that in my experience, much of my trauma comes from my past mental health experience, my suicide attempts, the times I was fired, and being given shock treatments instead of peer support. Whenever I am reminded of these experiences, I have overwhelming fear that can sometimes make me very reactive and angry. When I have been recently reminded of those times that I lost control, I have hallucinations. I used to think those were examples of psychotic illness, but now that know that this is just how my brain experiences stress. This is just how some people experience stress with back pain, ulcers, arthritis, headaches, or other chronic illnesses. Since the trauma reminders are stressful, the key for me is just to be mindful of my emotions and feel them and not try to bury them with substance use or other destructive outlets. Getting this message out is the key element of this program.
The Kansas Consumer Advisory Council for Adult Mental Health (CAC) is proud to be an innovator and change agent in providing information and leadership to create a Trauma Informed Care system in Kansas. RECOVERY FOR REAL is a CAC project funded by SAMHSA for development of a Trauma Informed Care (TIC) model.
Trauma informed care (TIC) asks not what’s wrong with you? Instead it asks what happened to you? The current model of mental health care asks about your symptoms (what‘s wrong with you?) and focuses on prescribing medications and treatment plans to you cope with your symptoms. It rarely asks what happened or looks at the symptoms as coping/survival strategies. TIC recognizes the coping/survival skills and doesn’t traumatize an individual or re-traumatize them when they seek help.
Trauma Informed Care is a monumental breakthrough because of the causal link between trauma and later health problems. Early trauma has been correlated to later life mental health and physical health issues in a research study conducted by the CDC in partnership with Kaiser Permanente called the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (www.ace.org).
Trauma Informed Care takes into account that most people who receive help in the public mental health system have been exposed to underlying trauma. That exposure creates vulnerabilities which must be taken into account for real recovery to occur. Recovery from a trauma-informed perspective makes choice, voice and trust central to the healing relationship.
My part in this program is to keep Kansas CAC’s FAcebook page and Twitter accounts active and updated. I am also gathering recovery stories that may be used to for websites of organizations with which I collaborate. I also give presentations across the US about Trauma Informed Care. I have tried to incorporate spoken word poetry to talk about my trauma experiences and how I have learned to move beyond them. Many people in the presentations say that the poetry is the most important part of the presentations. The video below is my best rendering of “The Train Poem.” This is about the day I found a way out of my past work issues trauma and realized that I could be strong enough to start my own business.
