Tag: Trauma

Childhood Trauma: Time, Trust, and Opportunities

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Research Paper Title

Repairing the effects of childhood trauma: The long and winding road.

Background

  • What is known on this subject:
    • Domestic and family violence contributes to mental distress and the development of mental illness and can reverberate throughout a person’s life.
  • What this paper adds to existing knowledge.
    • Therapeutic work with people who experience domestic and family violence needs to take considerable time to allow the process to unfold.
    • Understanding the triggers that cause past traumas to be re-experienced helps people to recognise and change their conditioned emotional responses.
  • What are the implications for practice?
    • Time needs to be invested to develop a secure and trusting relationship to enable a person to work through childhood experiences that have the potential to overwhelm.
    • It is important for adults who have experienced childhood trauma to have an opportunity to process the abuse to help minimise its intrusion in their lives.

Reference

Palmer, C., Williams, Y. & Harrington, A. (2019) Repairing the effects of childhood trauma: The long and winding road. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. doi: 10.1111/jpm.12581. [Epub ahead of print].

Happiness: Linking Temperament, Perspective, & Misfortune

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

I really like this reply by a reader to an article (in the New Scientist) about happiness (2019, p.26):

“Apparently, the search for happiness is now a well-funded industry.

Surely this calls into question whether spending so much time, money and, quite possibly, anxiety in its pursuit is counter-productive.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to question what exactly happiness is?

To me, it is experienced in response to a joyous event or achievement.

It is fleeting, before a return to the baseline.

Maintain this state for too long and it will lose its magic.

More superlative events will be needed to maintain this level of happiness, inflating everyday irritations to trauma.

Surely the answer lies in contentment?

A neutral level of default temperament offers a greater ability to enjoy genuine happiness at all levels, to keep minor annoyances in perspective and to promote greater strength in dealing with misfortune.”

Reference

Groves, R. (2019) Money Can’t Buy You Happiness or Contentment. New Scientist. 21 September 2019, pp.26.

Is There a Link between News Coverage & Trauma Symptoms?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

When something terrible happens in the world, it’s not uncommon to scroll through social media or flip through television channels in search of news coverage. But such media exposure may fuel post-traumatic stress symptoms for years afterwards – and could also drive someone to consume further distressing media.

With high-consequence events where we do not know why they happened, there is a fundamental drive to want to consume information until you get your head around it. Research suggests it may be a function of threat avoidance or wanting to return to some kind of rational understanding of the world around us.

Roxane Silver at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues surveyed a representative sample of more than 4400 US residents in the days after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Each person was also asked how many hours of related media coverage they consumed in three follow-up periods:

  • Six months after the bombing;
  • On its second anniversary; and
  • Five days after the 2016 mass shooting in the Pulse nightclub in Florida.

On average, the people surveyed consumed about 6 hours of media a day about the Boston bombing immediately after the event and a little more than 3 hours per day of media about the Pulse shooting.

Those who sought out more media about the bombing – whether or not they had a history of mental health conditions – were more likely to have trauma-related stress symptoms, such as upsetting thoughts, flashbacks and emotional distress, six months later (Thompson et al., 2019).

Two years after the bombing, such people were also more likely to worry about other events of mass violence occurring in the future, and consumed more coverage of the subsequent Pulse shooting.

References

Thompson, R.R., Jones, N.M., Holman, E.A. & Silver, R.C. (2019) Media Exposure to Mass Violence Events can Fuel a Cycle of Distress. Science Advances. 5(4), eaav3502. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav3502.

Whyte, C. (2019) New Coverage Link to Trauma Symptoms. New Scientist. 27 April 2019, pp.16.