Thread by @heidipsychology

Is it trauma informed care or retraumatising care? ✍️🏽
#psychology #mentalhealth #nhs #dclinpsy #socialjustice

Despite multiple trainings and workshops encouraging trauma informed care, many of our systems and actions do quite the opposite.

Bouncing servive users around services, telling them they are not 'appropriate' for a treatment, excluding those with a personality disorder diagnosis or 'flagging' them on the system as 'high risk' and therefore to avoid.

Expecting people with a long history of trauma to 'open up' in a limited amount of sessions and then blaming them if the therapy 'doesn't work', making services so hard to access and then once accessed, making service users feel like this is their 'one shot'. Having avoidant and

neglectful behaviours on inpatient settings etc. This is not to say that our services say these exact things and are deliberately out to abuse power and be unhelpful, as I think there have been such amazing protocols and work towards improving mental health care in the NHS,

but rather to bring attention to some issues and counterintuitive actions: increasing trauma informed protocols and trainings does nothing if we are ignoring all of the unhelpful nuances in our systems and allowing cultures of neglect and abuse of power to build 🤎