Books
Bloom, S. L. and Farragher, B. (2010) Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery Systems. New York: Oxford University Press
For the last thirty years, the nation's mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future.
Complex interactions among traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and a social and economic climate that is often hostile to recovery efforts recreate the very experiences that have proven so toxic to clients in the first place. Healing is possible for these clients if they enter helping, protective environments, yet toxic stress has destroyed the sanctuary that our systems are designed to provide.
This thoughtful, impassioned critique of business as usual begins to outline a vision for transforming our mental health and social service systems. Linking trauma theory to organizational function,Destroying Sanctuary provides a framework for creating truly trauma-informed services. The organizational change method that has become known as the Sanctuary Model lays the groundwork for establishing safe havens for individual and organizational recovery. The goals are practical: improve clinical outcomes, increase staff satisfaction and health, increase leadership competence, and develop a technology for creating and sustaining healthier systems. Only in this way can our mental health and social service systems become empowered to make a more effective contribution to the overall health of the nation.
Destroying Sanctuary is a stirring call for reform and recovery, required reading for anyone concerned with removing the formidable barriers to mental health and social services, from clinicians and administrators to consumer advocates.
Editors: Lorelei Atalie Vargas and Sandra L. Bloom (2007) Loss, Hurt and Hope: The Complex Issues of Bereavement and Trauma in Children Cambridge Scholars Press
What happens when a child experiences bereavement or trauma or both? When left untreated, childhood trauma crosses generational boundaries, developing risk factors that far outpace the threat of any other childhood disease, and yet, most children who have lived through a significant traumatic experience, usually do not get the care they need to begin their healing process. Children who have experienced trauma are often left grappling with devastating loss loss of self esteem, security, innocence and trust that is more challenging to diagnose and treat, than the more concrete loss of family, a pet or a home. Loss, Hurt and Hope: The Complex Issues of Bereavement and Trauma in Children gathers the collective wisdom of professionals who have spent years on the front lines working with children victimized by trauma. Each chapter illuminates how loss can shape a child s development and provides professionals with the tools necessary to help these children move from despair to hope and renewal. Experts in the field of child trauma explore the vulnerability of these children, effective methods of caring for them in a variety of treatment settings, and examine the impact of loss on organizations charged with caring for those who have experienced trauma. Loss, Hurt and Hope offers a multifaceted lens through which loss can be examined and appreciated, laying the groundwork for significant progress toward improving the understanding of the power of loss in our society.
Bloom, S. L. Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies. (1997). New York: Routledge.
This book describes the Sanctuary, an inpatient unit for the treatment of traumatized adults, and its underlying philosophy. The first two chapters focus on what traumatic experience does to the body, the mind, the relational network, and the ontology of the victim and those close to the victim. The third chapter presents arguments for the essentially social construction of human existence. The fourth chapter describes the experience of creating and maintaining a therapeutic milieu that is designed to address the needs of adults who were traumatized as children. The fifth and final chapter offers speculation about the potential for social reconnection.
Bloom, S. L. and Reichert, M. Bearing Witness: Trauma and Collective Responsibility. (1998). Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press.
In this book we intend to address this cycle of violence by discussing some of the biological, psychological, social, and even moral issues that determine whether a person will become a victim, perpetrator, or bystander to violent events and what happens to an individual when he or she is in one or all three of these roles. Throughout this book we hope we have conveyed one essential message: that it is a fundamental and absolute moral responsibility that we each find a way to bear witness to the pain and suffering that is all around us, and that starting from the position of this testimony we must join together to liberate the human body, mind, and soul from the rack of traumatic reenactment that is stretching our social body to the limit of endurance.
Bloom, S. L., Ed. (2001) Violence: A Public Health Epidemic and a Public Health Approach. London: Karnac Press.
In addressing the issue of violence, our first purpose is to provide practical information that will help the reader to design specific intervention strategies aimed at preventing the escalation of violence in any community. But the study of violence has taught us that such approaches will be ineffective unless we have a coherent and meaningful framework within which to understand the continuum of violent perpetration….. Only a shift in human understanding can help us to be more effective in slowing the pace of the disease down through the generations, from person to person, from family to family, from nation to nation.
Rich, John A. (2009) Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men. Baltimore: John Hopkins
Named One of the Top 20 Books of 2009 by Cleveland Plain Dealer
Medical school taught John Rich how to deal with physical trauma in a big city hospital but not with the disturbing fact that young black men were daily shot, stabbed, and beaten. This is Rich's account of his personal search to find sense in the juxtaposition of his life and theirs
