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Introduction
Published in Anna Thiemann, Rewriting the American Soul, 2017
Even though these therapeutic approaches seem to be objectively justified since they obviously build on state-of-the-art trauma research, they are far from ethically and politically neutral. Most traumas—be it domestic violence or war crimes—have a strong political dimension, and the treatment of individual trauma will affect how such incidents and related social issues are handled and discussed in the public arena. The nature and aims of psychotherapy influence the patients’ ability to address their traumatic experience in the public sphere, and medical concepts are susceptible to being appropriated and metaphorically extended to the collective realm.18 Yet, even though the clinical concept of trauma is closely related to cultural trauma discourses, they require different ethical analyses. As a literary scholar, I do not wish to discredit the work of medical practitioners—not least because I lack the competence to provide an empirical and ethical assessment of trauma therapy. My focus is on trauma theory’s broader political ramifications, which can be observed in cultural theory and public debates about collective trauma.
Mental health system in the Kingdom of Cambodia
Published in Dinesh Bhugra, Samson Tse, Roger Ng, Nori Takei, Routledge Handbook of Psychiatry in Asia, 2015
Even after the Khmer Rouge regime fell, Cambodia continued to suffer from civil war and unofficial economic sanctions and received emergency aid only from a few Eastern-bloc countries. After the Paris Peace accord in 1991, Cambodia slowly and steadily returned to peace under the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC, 1992–93). After peaceful democratic elections in 1998, 2003 and 2008, the Kingdom of Cambodia is now becoming a prosperous and developing nation. The survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime and civil war have endured exceedingly high levels of stress and collective trauma, which have had a severe impact on mental health. Currently, Cambodia is striving to improve the physical health of the nation by reducing infant and maternal mortality and meeting the HIV/AIDS crisis with meager resources. But demand for mental health care is huge and the psychosocial well-being of families and communities all over Cambodia is the cornerstone of sustained development. The loss of over a quarter of the population (the losses were especially high among the Cambodian intelligentsia); remaining landmines and unexploded bombs; massive destruction of infrastructure, the health care and education systems, as well as religious and cultural legacies; the extreme dehumanized brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime, and the search for the reasons for such brutality and better understanding of what happened and why; along with profound and multiple traumatic experiences have left Cambodia as a deeply traumatized society.
Child trauma in low-income countries and traumatised communities
Published in Panos Vostanis, Helping Children and Young People Who Experience Trauma, 2021
The realities hit us in terms of the numbers of children and the extent of trauma effects across large communities. Extreme poverty, high mortality rates, lack of basic needs, health hazards, preventable health conditions with their consequences, child labour, and lack of education and employment opportunities are not to be sniffed at. From 11 million child deaths every year, about two-thirds happen in only 10 low-income countries, and these could mostly be prevented, as they are attributed to diarrhoea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth. Malnutrition, lack of safe water and sanitation are related to half of all these fatalities. Seventy million children have no access to primary school education, and of those who do, only one in two will complete it in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. About 200 million children under the age of 17 years worldwide are involved in child labour, despite a current trend of slight decline. A large proportion of them work in horrendous conditions in mines, with dangerous machinery, chemicals or pesticides. These are all strong predictors of mental health problems, which have been confirmed in those circumstances, as research has transcended international barriers in recent years. Collective trauma like war, displacement, migration, collapse of support networks, and natural or human-induced disasters are risk waves affecting children and parents. Around 300 000 children are forced into armed conflict at any one time as soldiers or in other capacities, thus becoming both perpetrators of violence and being subjected to different types of abuse.
“Invisible During My Own Crisis”: Responses of LGBT People of Color to the Orlando Shooting
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2018
Johanna L. Ramirez, Kirsten A. Gonzalez, M. Paz Galupo
There is currently a paucity of research that centralizes the experiences and unique needs of LGBT-POC. The present research explores how a diverse sample of LGBT-POC responded to the event in Orlando. In times of large-scale community tragedy, previous literature has described active and passive ways of coping with negative events and emphasized the importance of sharing emotional experience with social supports to promote posttraumatic growth after a collective trauma (Rimé, Páez, Basabe, & Martínez, 2010; Shannonhouse, Barden, Jones, Gonzalez, & Murphy, 2015). Additional research has explored the extent to which individuals who are not directly victimized personally identify with victims of hate crime. Bell and Perry (2015) examined the impact of anti-LGB hate crimes on community nonvictims. When members of the LGB community are victimized, individuals who identify with the victims report feeling as though the hate crime or victimization happened to them personally, making a community of people particularly vulnerable (Bell & Perry, 2015).
Telemental Health during a Pandemic: Third Space Conversations
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2021
Mr. S. asked me for an in-person session as he lamented that “we were being recorded” when using social media platforms. My commitment to safety for both the client and to myself was lost in the challenges Mr. S. faced on a daily basis with his “tormentors.” His anxiety was based on his history of serious racial trauma, but also escalated in the community where he lived and saw many people of color sick and dying. Although Covid is a collective trauma, it has impacted individuals and communities differently. Visser (2015) writes: “Trauma is not coherent in cause and effect, but may affect individuals and communities negatively, forcing open preexisting fault lines (P. 258).
Hiding under the Color of Authority: Eric Wess Uller and his Decades-Long Rampage of Child Sexual Abuse
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2022
Paul R. Abramson, Sienna Bland-Abramson
The phrase collective trauma, or even collective identity (Alexander et al., 2004), is used to characterize a series of traumatic events that affect a large community of victims. The distinguishing characteristic of a collective trauma is that the suffering is never limited to the agony of its constituent targets, but instead, is something that insidiously impacts an entire network of people: parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, caretakers, and so on, who have been affected, in one way or another, by the collective suffering of the victim(s).