Note from the Editor

CrossCurrents

 

Every day, front-line mental health and addiction professionals work with people who have a history of trauma – physical, sexual or emotional abuse, witnessing violence, disaster or war. These front-line professionals are often the first to hear about a client’s trauma history, yet most feel unprepared to deal with trauma issues. While few people in treatment initially identify trauma as their main issue, it is clear that traumatic experiences and their aftermath are closely interwoven with mental health and addiction problems.

This doesn’t mean that every front-line professional must do trauma therapy. Rather, it means that these practitioners and the organizations for which they work must acknowledge the prevalence and pervasive impact of trauma on the lives of people with mental health and addiction problems. At the service level, it is not so much what front-line professionals do to help, but how they do it. Trauma-informed care, as one trauma survivor put it, means asking not “What is wrong with you?” but “What happened to you?”

Tim Wall, director of Counselling Services at Klinic Community Health Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, describes a province-wide initiative that has led to the development of a trauma-informed care toolkit, which includes the practical checklists reprinted in this issue. Anne Ptasznik’s story about restraints reform challenges inpatient practices that can be retraumatizing for people with histories of trauma – and traumatizing for those without such histories. Other stories discuss client and family involvement in developing and maintaining trauma-informed systems of care. In the Last Word, Dr. Kathy Hegadoren, a professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta, challenges us to consider the implications of same-sex general psychiatry inpatient units.

It is with this issue that Dr. David Goldbloom wraps up his tenure as executive editor. I would like to thank him for his wisdom, creativity, humour and support. In his View from CAMH, David introduces his successor, Dr. Kwame McKenzie, who I know will inspire and challenge CrossCurrents to grow in new directions.

Hema Zbogar
tel 416 595­6714
hema_zbogar@camh.net

 

 

 

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