Trauma is pervasive throughout the world and has negative impact on individuals, communities and society (Magrueder et al, 2016). Post-traumatic stress disorder is a social disease that ripples down through generations (Bloom, 2013). The realisation that humans tend to repeat traumatic experience has led to the fear that our society is suffering post-traumatic deterioration that could lead to self-destruction as it can do with individuals who remained locked into traumatic patterns (Bloom, 2013). Trauma is not rare or unusual, but normative in modern societies. Trauma can become the central organising principle in a society and humanity generally. Without this understanding we will not attempt to create the changes we need, says Bloom.
Thomas Hubel (2020) argues that living in the modern world means that we are familiar with trauma even if it is unconscious. Societies can be filled with the same symptoms as individual trauma: Anxieties, phobias, obsessions, compulsions and addictions. Hubel claims that our societies are dominated by trauma energy. The symptoms of this are disparate worldviews, distorted perceptions and a general sense of disembodiment and disconnection, cut off from our collective roots and our ancestors, leading lives that are unsustainable in a society that is unsustainable. Trauma, argues Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015), is the largest public health issue of our time.
Andrew Samuels writes that the contribution made by psychotherapy beyond relieving individual distress has been minimal (Warnecke, 2015). This critique sees psychotherapy as developing a false independence and eroding communal life. Tom Warnecke notes that psychotherapy is available in private sectors of high-income societies but it is much more difficult to access within public services and even more so for demographic minorities. There are efforts made in some countries to expand access but this often only gives an ‘economy’ version rather than gold standard of clinical practice. The most serious critique of psychotherapy is its narrow cultural reach and appeal. Depth psychology has failed to expand its client base beyond ‘the articulate middle-class’.
There has been a call to ‘reboot’ mental health treatment in order to address the population level burden of mental health (Kazdin and Blaze, 2011). Rather than seeking to deliver only efficacious services the public health approach seeks to balance efficacy with ‘reach’ – getting at higher proportion of the population. Research and practice is guided by how far an intervention goes in reaching the population level burden of child trauma. A new approach is needed that goes beyond the individual to the vast population impact of trauma. Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015) has pointed out that trauma is a political and societal issue – most traumatised people do not access treatment. A new model is needed.
References
Bloom, S. L. (2013). Creating sanctuary: Toward the evolution of sane societies. Routledge.
Hübl, T., & Avritt, J. J. (2020). Healing collective trauma: A process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds. Sounds True.
Jordan, J. V. (2017). Relational-cultural therapy. Theories of Psychotherapy Seri.
Kolk, B. V. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin.
Kazdin, A. E., & Blase, S. L. (2011). Rebooting psychotherapy research and practice to reduce the burden of mental illness. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 21-37. doi:10.1177/1745691610393527
Magruder, K. M., Kassam-Adams, N., Thoresen, S., & Olff, M. (2016). Prevention and public health approaches to trauma and traumatic stress: A rationale and a call to action. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 7(1), 29715. doi:10.3402/ejpt.v7.29715