Search results

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects both civilian and military populations following wartime experiences. However, despite an abundance of research investigating civilian and military populations separately, much less focus has been given to synthesizing and integrating findings to describe how civilian and military war survivors are comparatively affected by PTSD. This review is broken down into three sections covering (1) risk factors associated with PTSD, (2) relationships between PTSD and mental health outcomes, and (3) protective factors that can attenuate PTSD and its effects. Each section covers findings for civilians and military personnel and highlights similarities and differences between groups.

Using Margaret Price's concept of kairotic space, this chapter asserts that the first-year writing classroom is a particularly fitting place to explore topics like consent and sexual assault. However, I caution the importance of using a trauma-informed approach to these topics. I provide an overview of the distinctions between related fields: trauma-informed pedagogy, trauma theory, and disability studies in order to argue for a pedagogical approach that takes each into account. First-year writing instructors, as well as other instructors in the university, should strive to live in the discomfort that often emerges from difficult material not only because it is necessary for building a better society but also because it is pedagogically sound. Furthermore, I argue that in order to have a truly trauma-informed approach, we need to change the very foundations of the university.

To outline the critical role of the sporting context in traumatic experiences, exploring sport as a catalyst to traumatic experiences and as part of the recovery process. In doing this, the chapter also aims to review the qualitative literature on trauma and provide recommendations for future research directions.

The chapter begins by asking two key questions: what silences some stories of trauma in sport and what stories are valued above others? In answering these questions, the qualitative literature is discussed with particular reference to how voice is given to stories of trauma.

Trauma may be silenced by the particular norms and values that exist within sport, creating a culture in which athletes and coaches alike fear to speak out. As a consequence, trauma stories are not voiced but avoided, a strategy that is not conducive to good mental health. The difficulties in coping with trauma may then become ameliorated by the dominance and expectation of stories of growth through adversity.

Creative strategies for allowing athletes to voice stories of trauma are discussed, including the use of visual and written methods.

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

In the previous chapter, I introduced trauma-informed care as an approach to organisational change and a shift in culture to recognise that many employees and people attending services have past trauma experiences. In this chapter, I recast servant leadership (SL) as a trauma-informed leadership model that naturally operationalises some of the principles discussed in the TIA literature. The first section of this chapter addresses the societal need for a more ethical and moral leadership approach, before briefly outlining the prevalence of trauma experienced by service users and employees. The next section provides an overview and definition of SL in a general sense, before articulating a trauma-informed model of SL and its characteristics. Finally, some of the outcomes associated with SL are discussed with a key focus on how this approach operationalises the principle of psychological safety, trust and empowerment found in trauma-informed approaches, as they relate to employees.

In this chapter, screening and assessments within specific and non-specific trauma-informed services will be discussed as integral to both the identification of trauma incidences and as an integral component of trauma therapy. The first part of this chapter will examine how those working in non-specific trauma services can use screening instruments to help identify and make referrals to trauma specific organisations. As outlined already, non-specific trauma services are those who are committed to working from a trauma-informed lens and come into contact with those more likely to have trauma experiences; however, they are not services specifically set up to work with trauma. Some of the challenges and risks when using such assessment are delineated, with helpful tips for their effective use. A table containing some of the brief screening measures found in the extant literature is provided, all of which are psychometrically sound. Moving forward, I explore some of the literature around the assessment process for those seeking trauma specific therapy in services. In doing so, this chapter demonstrates that safety, trust, choice, empowerment and culture considerations from the trauma-informed literature can operate throughout the screening and assessment processes and that ethical imperatives should always be front and centre of the practitioners mind.