It’s fair to say that trauma and traumatised are often misused terms in today’s language, with frequent appearances in conversation and on social media. However, we also have an enormous amount of unmet and overlooked need when it comes to treating real psychological trauma and its consequences.
Trauma can be difficult to pin down, especially if you are trying to define it precisely. It can mimic other conditions and hide itself in the strangest of places: in one person it may look like depression, in another rage, and in another a compulsion to eat for any grain of comfort that the food may provide.
Childhood trauma in particular - including physical and psychological abuse, bereavement and exposure to traumatic events - has consistently been found to increase the risk of physical and psychological ill health in later life. Even after accounting for social and lifestyle factors, conditions as diverse as migraine, breathing problems and digestive disorders have been found to be more common among those who have experienced childhood trauma, as well as psychological conditions such as depression and anxiety.
This is not a niche problem. Childhood trauma affects a substantial proportion of the population, with one widely cited paper finding that just over 28% affected. Some studies estimate that 5% of children and adolescents have diagnosable PTSD at some point. That is a huge number of people to be carrying around the weight of fear, shame and misunderstanding inherent to these situations.
The most frustrating part of all of this is that effective treatments exist. Granted, they require the availability of skilled clinicians, but psychological treatments for trauma have been shown to work as well as many physical treatments which we provide with little debate.
Trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) are evidence-based and effective. Yet access – especially for children, and especially in crisis – remains scarce, especially in the public sector.
A world where trauma does not exist is inconceivable. But it should not be unrealistic to imagine a world where adequate treatment for trauma is available, in the same way that we treat broken bones and chest infections.