A Brief Study on Trauma

Hey guys! Hope everyone’s had a good week.

   This week I thought it might be nice to have a little look at what trauma actually is. I was originally going to do it in one blog post but I started writing it yesterday and by the end had more of a mini essay than a blog post so today is just the first half hugely condensed. However first, I should probably give a brief training update as well so here it is quickly –

  This past week’s been fairly easy running wise with the exception of the introduction of a race pace run on my timetable which from now on will be every Wednesday. Race pace is 2 miles an hour faster than my normal running pace and I actually found it really, really hard to keep up even for just a 2 mile run. It’s not the actual pace I’ll run the marathon at since I never run further than 5 miles doing it thankfully (the thought of running 26 miles at race pace makes me want to curl up in a corner and start rocking). However I have just realised that the run I’m doing on Christmas day is a 2.5 mile race pace run…joy of joys.

Now, on with the actual interesting bit J

What is Trauma?

   I think it’s often easy to think of trauma as witnessing a murder or being in a car accident however the term covers a lot more than that. Most dictionary definitions I found describe a traumatic event as an event which is in some way distressing and damaging. In the DSM –IV, which is the manual used to diagnose mental illness, the criteria for an event being traumatising enough to lead to illness states that the person must experience or witness an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the persons physical integrity (basically, right to your body so slavery would be a violation of physical integrity) of self or others.

    The number of people that have experienced at least one traumatic event that meet these criteria is actually pretty high. In 2005 Frans, Rimmo, Aberg, and Fredrikson found that 80% of respondents to a telephone survey on the general population in Sweden had experienced at least one event that met the DSM-IV requirements for trauma. And in 2007 a study on a representative sample of the general population in the US found that 67.8% of children have experienced trauma. This means a lot of people at risk of developing some form of mental illness which I’ll talk more about next week.

What causes Trauma?

   Causes of trauma are classed as either an act of god (e.g a hurricane) or an act of human. Trauma caused by human origin is most damaging because the trauma is either, intentional and deliberate, or due to human neglect and disregard. This deliberate or uncaring cause of the trauma causes feelings of betrayal in the victim and leads to a much deeper psychological wound as it adds a personal level to the trauma experienced. It suggests to the victim that they are not worth being cared for, or that they in some way deserve the treatment they received. This can be further exacerbated by people in a position to help the victim who are insensitive to the victims situation as it adds a second layer of betrayal to the victim and can act to reinforce the beliefs laid down in the initial trauma situation – examples of this are when child abuse victims are not believed or when victims of rape are told they were asking for it.

Next week I’m going to look a little bit at the effects of undergoing trauma on individuals and the challenges faced when treating victims of trauma. There is so much more that I could write about this but for the sake of keeping posts short I’m not, however if anyone’s interested then I’ve included the reference to a really useful and interesting paper I found to help write this here - Courtois, C. A., & Gold, S. N. (2009). The need for inclusion of psychological trauma in the professional curriculum: A call to action. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 1(1), 3.

   Thanks for reading guys, if you think that keeping a centre that treats trauma FOR FREE is worth your money, or you’re impressed that I’ll be running my lungs out at race pace on Christmas day and want to cheer me up about it then please please please please donate.  You can donate online at https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/runningintorecovery it’s really easy - even just 50p is welcome.

  And also, if you want to learn more about TRC then as always, here’s their website - http://www.trc-uk.org/