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What Does It Take to Create Trauma-Informed Mental Health Systems and Why Does It Matter? Research has documented that a previous history of exposure to violence and other kinds of traumatic experiences plays a significant role in the development of a wide variety of mental health problems. In this presentation, Dr. Sandra Bloom will address some key questions: What does it mean to create “trauma-informed” mental health systems?; What are the systemic barriers to recovery from trauma that presently exist?; What changes do patients, clinicians and systems need to make in order to adequately address the needs of traumatized people? OBJECTIVES
Organizational Stress as a Barrier to Change
Clients who present to mental health, social service agencies, and other public health settings are typically under significant stress and often have a history of exposure to traumatic stress. These stressed individuals then must interact with organizations that are strained by budget cuts, changes in health care management strategies, and operating with staff shortages. Caught between acutely distressed individuals seeking help and over-taxed organizations are the therapists, childcare workers, physicians, nurses and other professionals who make up the staff of any public or private service setting. Helpers frequently find themselves in the role of mediators between the conflicting demands of their organizations and their clients, inadvertently participating in parallel processes of dysfunctional stress management. During this presentation, the participants will learn about a coherent way of understanding these seemingly conflicting demands and will be encouraged to develop some personal and professional strategies for managing these demands while simultaneously helping their clients develop better stress management techniques. OBJECTIVES:
Trauma Theory: Understanding the Roots of Human Pathology
The plenary presentation will focus on the presentation of a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the root cause of a substantial proportion of psychiatric and social dysfunction – the violence, abuse, and neglect that human beings inflict on one another. Trauma theory is a comprehensive biopsychosocial model for understanding the human response to overwhelming stress and how that response can impact normal human development and behavior.
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Creating Sanctuary: Reconsidering the Power of Victims to Change
Patients with complex post-traumatic stress disorders pose considerable challenges to treatment in both the inpatient and outpatient setting. In this presentation we will look at the legacy of trauma and the implications of this legacy for all treatment settings. Treatment for complex disorders is naturally very complex and S.E.L.F. – an acronym representing Safety, Emotional Management, Loss and Future - provides an organizing framework that can be shared by the patient and the therapist.
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Creating Sanctuary: A Strategic Approach for Treating Difficult Problems
Exposure to family violence plays a significant role in the development of many problems that result in inpatient psychiatric hospitalization and outpatient treatment. We call our systemic response to such violence “Creating Sanctuary” – the creation of nonviolent, health-promoting, socially responsible and humane environments. This presentation will describe the treatment of victims of violence in a short-term, open inpatient psychiatric unit using a trauma-based approach as an important illustration for the basic assumptions underlying the creation of any safe environment. In addition to its application to inpatient treatment, The Sanctuary Model is currently being applied to residential facilities for children and adolescents and both private and public school settings.
OBJECTIVES:
Creating Sanctuary: Developing Safe Environments for the New Millennium
This workshop will revolve around a discussion of a systemic response to violence – the creation of nonviolent, health-promoting and humane environments – “Creating Sanctuary”. The concepts of the Sanctuary Model uniquely synthesize what we have learned about the biopsychosocial impact of trauma with a long-standing understanding of the therapeutic milieu process. The treatment practiced utilized by The Sanctuary, called “S.EL.F.” can assist all caregivers in the development of a map for recovery.
OBJECTIVES:
Creating Sanctuary in Schools To prevent school violence, we need to understand the roots of violence, what triggers violence, and how we can increase “social immunity”. This workshop will focus on the four fundamental levels of safety—physical, psychological, social and moral – and explore the assumptions, goals and practices that must be shared to create safe school environments. The presenter will demonstrate why ensuring physical safety is important, but alone can never be sufficient to create a safe environment and describe the Sanctuary in the Schools prevention component of a Safe Schools and Communities grant being implemented in Atlantic County, New Jersey. Keeping schools safe today is a significant challenge for every school administrator. Attending only to physical safety in schools, although absolutely necessary, is not sufficient and tends to lead to school environments that are more like prisons than educational institutions. Creating environments that also insure psychological, social and ethical safety is critical to the establishment of truly safe school environments yet doing so is often confounded by the unrecognized impact of previous exposure to violence. Creating Sanctuary in Schools requires a thorough understanding of the impact of trauma on children, families, staff and systems Creating Sanctuary for Children in Care Creating Sanctuary refers to a trauma-informed whole system approach to residential treatment programs for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral problems, and histories of maltreatment and exposure to family or community violence. The intervention, referred to as the Sanctuary Model®, is based in social psychiatry, trauma theories, therapeutic community philosophy, and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Within the context of safe, supportive, stable, and socially responsible therapeutic communities, a trauma recovery treatment framework is used to teach youths effective adaptation and coping skills to replace non-adaptive cognitive, social, and behavioral strategies that may have emerged earlier as means of coping with traumatic life experiences. Neither Liberty Nor Security: The Impact of Chronic Stress and Terror on Individuals, Organizations, and Politics The field of traumatic stress studies and terror management theory provides valuable information about how individuals deal with the impact of overwhelming stress and the experience of terror. We are also learning a great deal about the nature of recovery from these experiences. In this seminar we will look at the way the minds and bodies of individuals are affected by severe stress and use that as a way of developing a deeper understanding of what happens to stressed individuals who come together to form stressed organizations and the impact of this stress on organizational leaders. The series will also explore the parallel process that occurs when traumatized individuals and stressed organizations come together to form stressed societies and explore the implications of individual healing for organizational and even societal healing. OBJECTIVES:
Mental Health Treatment and the Impact of Traumatic Experience A past history of trauma plays an important role in the development of many of the disorders that mental health and social service professionals are asked to treat. At the same time, traumatized people have a very high rate of psychiatric and substance abuse comorbidity. Given the complex nature of these problems it is often difficult to know how to organize treatment in a way that gets everyone involved – therapist, psychiatrist, client, other service delivery professionals – on the same page. In this presentation, Dr. Sandra Bloom, founder of the Sanctuary Model, will discuss a coherent, manageable, and jargon-free framework for organizing treatment and the implications of trauma theory for all mental health workers. OBJECTIVES:
1. Participants will be able to describe the way in which traumatic experience impacts on the psychological development of children and adults 2. Participants will be able to describe the implications of these impacts on the treatment setting 3. Participants will be able to formulate a case utilizing an acronym that describes the four key aspects of recovery from overwhelming experience.
Evolution’s Legacy: Trauma and Adaptation
This workshop will focus on the presentation of a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the root cause of a substantial proportion of psychiatric and social dysfunction in children – the violence, abuse, and neglect that human beings inflict on one another. Trauma theory is a comprehensive biopsychosocial model for understanding the human response to overwhelming stress and how that response can impact normal development and behavior. An understanding of this psychobiological response helps therapists, teachers, parents, foster care parents, and children take an entirely different approach to troublesome behaviors with substantially different results.
OBJECTIVES:
Double Trouble: Trauma, Abuse, and Substance Abuse This training will focus on the special problems posed by the interaction of trauma, abuse and substance abuse. The interactions between the various disorders are complicated and often mutually reinforcing and provide substantial problems for clients and the people who help them. OBJECTIVES:
Why Does She Stay? The Psychosocial Impact of Family Violence This training will focus more specifically on issues surrounding domestic violence, including myths about battered women. We will discuss the impact of family violence on children and how to best address the needs of battered women and their kids. OBJECTIVES:
Understanding Domestic Violence for Physicians This presentation will provide physicians with an overview understanding about the trauma of domestic violence and what they can do about it. We will review some of the mythology surrounding battering, provide basic information about victims and perpetrators, look at the psychobiology involved in family violence and provide a basic screening tool that physicians can use in their practice to evaluate patients for domestic violence. OBJECTIVES:
Context and Content: Creating Sanctuary and Using S.E.L.F. to Organize the Central Tasks of Healing This training will focus on a description of the basic Sanctuary concepts that are necessary to provide the proper context within which treatment can occur. We will focus on eliciting the basic assumptions, goals and practices necessary to create truly safe environments for clients recovering from trauma. Attention will then turn describe an effective and accessible model for organizing the complex issues of training and treatment surrounding clients who have trauma related problems. This model is called “S.E.L.F.”, and the four letters represent “Safety”, “Emotional management”, “Loss” and “Future”. OBJECTIVES:
Vicarious Traumatization: How the Work Affects UsVicarious traumatization (v.t.) describes the positive and negative changes that can happen to caregivers as a result of exposure to the pain and suffering of others. One of the important factors in reducing the negative effects of v.t. is to recognize that it exists and be willing to build in organizational resistance to its impact. During this part of the training participants will be asked to do a self-evaluation and develop some strategies for better self-care. OBJECTIVES:
Creating Sanctuary in the Home and in the Community Safety in the home, at work, and in the community is not something any of us can take for granted. Safety must be actively created by each of us, in our schools, our workplaces, and most importantly, in our homes. Every day we must all take responsibility for changing the ways that we contribute to unsafe environments. Safety does not just mean physical safety, but psychological, social and moral safety as well. Exposure to violence negatively impacts on our ability as individuals and as a group, to maintain safe environments in an easy and natural way. Instead, we have to work at recreating safe, Sanctuary-type environments for each other and ourselves. For every family, school, workplace and community setting this requires participating in a “constitutional” process of redefining the basic rules that must govern both personal and social interactions. Creating Sanctuary: Transforming a Culture of Violence to NonviolenceViolence is contagious and if we are to increase “social immunity” we must understand the roots of violence, what triggers violence, the way violence spreads, and factors that protect a community against violence. The last twenty years has seen a burgeoning of knowledge about the impact that traumatic experiences have on the physical, psychological, social and moral adjustment of human beings This knowledge has implications for the way we organize our individual lives, our workplaces, our schools and our communities. In this presentation, we will look at how we actively create and/or support a culture of violence and what goes into creating nonviolent, safe environments for healing and for living. OBJECTIVES:
The Interface Between the Impact of Trauma and the Criminal Justice System Research has demonstrated that there are intimate connections between childhood abuse/or neglect, exposure to adolescent and adult violence and both revictimization and perpetration. The criminal justice response to family violence has made a dramatic shift in the last twenty years thanks to the combined efforts of victims, victim advocates, and dedicated law enforcement and criminal justice workers, but there is still a long way to go. Law enforcement and the judiciary has a vital role to play in taking the lead in our community fight against the scourge of family violence. In research that has studied the overall community response to domestic violence, active involvement of the judiciary has been critical in determining the success of the efforts. The body of information relating to the complex impact of trauma on the psychobiology of individuals is relatively new and can be instrumental in formulating constructive judicial responses to these difficult problems. This training will offer a coherent framework for understanding how trauma affects the physical, psychological, social and moral development of individuals and families.
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