Seeking Safety from Trauma

Over the last decade we have seen a deluge of spilled ink and sermons delivered on the topic of Trauma (capital letter intended).   Therapists and other clinicians are wont to see Trauma as the cause of all mental/emotional distress and disorder.  Payers and regulators want to see Trauma informed care as the standard for all services.

Please don't misunderstand and think I am about to argue against trauma as a factor of etiology.  I am not.  Please do not think I am going argue against trauma sensitive care.  I am not.

I do, however, have to take issue with a number of things.  One of which, I will briefly introduce here, is an intuitive response to emotional trauma (or the vision of Trauma in the mind's eye of the therapist).  I have noticed a tendency among my colleagues to fix Trauma through the exclusive use of invoking Safety (capital letter intended).

What is Safety?  It is a mythical destination we point people to who we believe are wounded by emotional trauma.  In its simplest and cliched manifestation, it is the "safe place" we tell people to go to inside themselves when they are distressed by Traumas past or current.  In its most Utopian manifestation, it is the construction (socially and physically) of a space (or whole communities) designed to remove all sources of trauma and reminders of trauma.  A Safe place is a place where people speak to each other exclusively in soft and supportive tones.  A Safe place has no rules to remind us we are not in control.  In a Safe place no one tells me I am wrong.  A Safe place is a place without "no".

The idea of creating Safety seems to come to some practitioners by intuition and without need for training.  For other practitioners (e.g., Sandra Bloom) it is a treatment model that is bottled, trademarked and sold, but more than that it is a morally driven world view.  It is true by faith and has to be defended against the unbelieving (read: medical model).

Why do we need to create Safety?  Because Trauma doesn't just hurt in the moment, it continues to harm day after day, year after year.  Life's little annoyances and disappointments are more than they are.  They are reminders of the Trauma.  Triggers and re-triggers.  It harms even when the individual has no idea it continues to harm.  Why?  Because the clinician believes.  Sometimes the individual doesn't even know they were Traumatized.  In those cases, the true believing therapist has to help the individual remember . . . (we know where that leads).

That's the reasoning for it.  I can't fault the premise (that psychological trauma hurts), but I doubt the conclusions.

So then, does creating a Safe place help?  I feel the need to ask, if only because so many around me seem to take it on faith.

I haven't come across so much empirical evidence apart from the some apocryphal study about mice and cat hairs.  But maybe this Trauma-Safety dilemma has a corollary in Happiness?  Seeking Happiness for the Sad seems like a very similar impulse to me.  And in that realm I think we do have some evidence that tells us it is a fool's quest.  Turning Sadness into Happiness through the power of affirmations, replacing negative self talk with positive self talk, while intuitively sensible, turns out to be the psychological equivalent of trying to catch a rainbow.  Every time I tell myself I'm beautiful and smart and wonderful, the opposites of those things echo in the mind and I have to increase my affirmations louder and louder to myself, but in the end, affirmations in a vacuum do not lead to Happiness.

Could the quest for Safety be a similar fairy tale?  A nagging doubt tells me so.   The fact that no one questions it, makes me worry all the more.

• Focusing so exclusively on Safety paradoxically highlights an individual's vulnerability.
• Focusing so exclusively on past Trauma reifies victimhood and takes the person out of the here and now.
• By focusing on victimhood we take away a person's agency.
• By focusing on the past we can't change, we forget the here and now where a person actually does have the power to change things.
• By externalizing cause and effect we have taken all control away from the person.

Considering these things, is it any wonder that we see so many people taking part in this therapeutic approach sink deeper and deeper into dysfunction?

Peers of the Mental Health Realm

The last decade has seen a flood of peer counselors in the public mental health system in the U.S., the basic idea modeled, if loosely, on the the practice of recovered addicts becoming counselors in the alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment field.  In mental health it has the added gain of making public mental health treatment a more humane and understanding place.  Psychiatric survivor activists have long called for this move.  If services are provided by counselors who have themselves experienced mental health problems and have been on the receiving end of services, then services will inevitably be rendered in a more sensitive and user-friendly manner.

These things are true as intended, but I feel the need to point out there is also a dark tangled mass of contradictions, uncertainty, and politics that inhabit the practice of peer counseling like a hidden cyst threatening to break open and poison the entire initiative.  As always, I find myself the voice of doom and gloom in the fantasy land of Mental Health where fake positivism, false prophets, and general quackery goes hand in hand with unicorns, pixies, and evidence base practices.

Peer counselors come to the public mental health field like faerie-activists waving their magic "recovery" wands.  They go to the dark places of mental health--think Shutter Island, Sucker Punch, One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and hundred other examples--and these peers turn the dark places into sunlit gardens of recovery with doors broken open to let the sunlight in and to let the inmates out to discover they were never mentally ill to begin with--it was all a lie made up by psychiatry and Big Pharma.

The only thing is, it’s just another lie really.  Let me give you a smattering.

1. Peers do not necessarily have special insight into the experience of individual mental health system users.

Mental health peers are self defined.  It has to be so for simple legal reasons.  A prospective employer is not permitted to ask about an applicant’s disability.  It is contingent upon the applicant to decide if she or he is or is not a mental health peer.

In the AOD field, addiction disorders are a straightforward set of behavioral categories that are bound by a single phenomenon: addiction.  Straightforward, relative to mental health anyway.  By contrast, mental health disorders cover so vast an array of human behavior patterns so as to be absurd.  What does it mean to be a mental health peer?  Does someone who experienced adult attention deficit have some kind of special insight into what it’s like to experience schizophrenia?  Or vice versa?  If that seems like a stretch, it’s because it is.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which medical peers--people who have experienced medical problems and have received medical treatment in their lifetimes--replace nurses in your doctor’s clinic.  Will a medical peer who has experienced medical treatment for eczema have some special understanding, gleaned from experience, into the medical needs of a patient with necrotizing fasciitis?  Sound preposterous?  Why then is the idea of mental health peers any less preposterous?

2. In mental health, recovery is a word without meaning.

One of the basic rationalizations for peer counselors is that a peer is a living example of recovery, a person with a mental health condition who has persevered, and met their therapeutic goals, and now can work productively as a peer counselor.

It stands to reason.  This rationale works very well in AOD services where peer counselors are the norm.  In that field, peer counselors have beat their addiction--they are in recovery--and they can help other addicts on the path to recovery through the wisdom of their experience.

Okay, that’s all well and good.  But.  In the AOD field, recovery is black and white.  You are either using, or you aren’t.  Recovery is tested and assured by urinalysis.

If you think mental health has a standard of recovery, you are mistaken.  Recovery, like the peer identity itself, is entirely self defined.  Anyone, and I mean anyone, can walk through the door and proclaim they are a peer and they are in recovery.  There is no testing and such claims are accepted at face value, at least at time of hire.  This literally true.

Sadly, I have seen peer counselors (and therapists and psychiatrists for that matter) with untreated axis II disorders do great harm.

3. The sudden, poorly thought-out growth in peer services is driven by feel-good politics.

This true statement does not discount the possibility of benefit from having peers working in the system, but, it does tell us something about the process that led to the current situation and can illuminate how preventable problems were allowed to fester.  The peer counselor initiative may have a grassroots origin in the consumer/survivor movement, but it came to fruition because of state legislatures and state level department heads made the decision that peer delivered services is a good thing and made it so through law and regulation that, if not mandates, at least incentivises the practice in many states.

System changes driven at the state level are seldom well considered.

4.  And it is powered by cost cutting.

Medicaid reimbursement for services delivered by a peer counselor is considerably less than reimbursement for services provided by bachelors and masters level clinicians.  This impacts state budgets.

Need I say more?

The Trauma Bandwagon

Gee whiz.  Is it just me, or is there a "trauma" jihad going on?  I can't open my eyes without seeing the word "trauma" in bold headlines in newspapers and journals and in 4H newsletters.  Do I see a new line of Hallmark "Trauma Condolence and Get Well" Cards on the way?

Don't get me wrong now.  I fully support the idea that psychological trauma is bad and can lead to bad things, and supporting people who have experienced trauma is a good thing, but let's try to have some perspective here people.  There is a mob mentality going on.  Is it a competition?  Is that it?  That would explain why people seem to think they're going to get a special treat if they use the word "trauma" more often and louder than anyone else.  A kind of self-satisfied glow appears on people's faces every time they use the word.

Maybe I'm just an old stick-in-the-mud Scrooge.  Bah-humbug.

Recovery or Denial?

“The Recovery Model.”  It sure sounds good, don’t it?  Recovery is one of the now buzzwords.  So, what does it really mean?  Did someone find a cure for schizophrenia?  Because, if they did, it’s a well kept secret.

The recovery model promotes the idea that people can recover from mental illness.  This is an important concept for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it promises to counter the phenomenon of people getting labeled and institutionalized and then forgotten.  It challenges the neglectful attitude that people can’t get better.  It highlights the fact that some problem behaviors are actually a result of institutionalization and over-medication.  It provides hope.  These are good things.

It is also used by state human services departments as a rationale for cutting or even eliminating funding for secure residential care for people with severe psychiatric disabilities.  The result?  People with severe disabilities are forcibly moved to community placements, and if-and-when they don’t make it, they end up on the streets.

That sure-as-shit don’t sound like recovery to me.

The fact is, there are some people who will get better with treatment (or sometimes even without) and there are some with more severe conditions who will not recover and need continuing treatment and care.

Yet again, we have a treatment model that is not based on science, but on political and economic expediency and because there is so much political correctness and complacency in the system, very few seem willing to speak up about it.

Dr. Munetz put it with nicer words than I can muster in his letter to Psychiatric Services (APA journal):  Denial of Mental Illness

Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of an honest discussion of the issues.  That would be real hope.