Stories Of Trauma Research Articles

Stories of Trauma and Idioms of Distress: From Cultural Narratives to Clinical Assessment

In the case of long-term major traumatic events such as the Cambodian tragedy there is a close relationship between the individual’s clinical history and the collective history of his/her ethnic group. Most of the refugees who have survived a given historical event share the same history with nearly the same trauma, the same loss, the same flight to escape, the same difficult resettlement and so on. However, even if refugees have lived the same events, this does not mean that they have experienced the same trauma. Both trauma and culture shape human experience and may give the illusion of a common destiny that would flatten out varying individual fates, whereas in fact different destinies are contingently linked together. These questions pose a challenge to clinicians’ knowledge of the relationship between trauma, culture and subjectivity and of course they challenge the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder as well. While knowledge of cultural differences is essential for clinicians, it is equally essential to be aware of how the individual’s psyche may find hidden paths within the constraints imposed by culture, or even by trauma itself. To illustrate this issue, the article focuses on the case study of a Cambodian refugee to France.

Trauma Stories: Violence, Emotion and Politics in Somali Ethiopia

This article draws on ethnographic material from Ethiopia to address two ways of making sense of violence and death: individual psychological trauma, in one society’s domain of psychological medicine, and personal and collective injury, in another society’s domain of politics. Both approaches entail theories of emotion and human nature. Both are embedded in social relations and have implications at individual, social and political levels. Among Somalis in Ethiopia, war-related distress is not interpreted in a medical framework aimed at healing. Rather, such violence is predominantly assimilated into the framework of Somali politics, in which individual injuries are considered injuries to a lineage or other defined group. The dominant emotion in this context is not sadness or fear, but anger, which has emotional, political and material importance in validating individuals as members of a group sharing mutual rights and obligations. Before advocating trauma-based models of war-related distress, researchers and practitioners should consider whether a medical framework would do better at helping individuals and communities to deal with distress and reconstruct meaningful lives and relationships in circumstances of longstanding collective violence.

Nationalizing the Olympics Around and Away from “Vulnerable” Bodies of Women

This article examines print media responses to the 1996 NBC coverage of the Olympic Games and the actual coverage of the women’s gymnastics competition. Whereas print media critics of the coverage emphasize NBC’s feminization of the Olympics, which they imagine as a unique televisual event, this article underscores the nationalizing function of the narratives (stories of personal trauma). By focusing on the production of women gymnasts as sites of national investment, the author shows how the coverage narratives function to contain other nationals and the individual vulnerabilities of the American gymnasts. More specifically, the author argues that even as “America” is separated and distinguished from other nations, and individual vulnerabilities are translated into the invulnerability of Team USA, both the coverage and the reactions to it attest to an anxiety that accompanies the production of “little girls” as main sites of national investment.

Constructive Narrative in Arresting the Impact of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Research and clinical practice in social work have historically recognized a strengths perspective. More recently, the role of a constructivist perspective has been discussed in social work education and practice. Narrative construction for the stress disordered client reflects both perspectives. Social workers can listen for and, with clients, identify strengths, survivorship, and resilience as the stories of trauma and victimization are told. Attending to the language of strength and survivorship can actually yield realistic treatment goals. A model of collaborative conceptualization of the problem and target goals is presented with the intended focus of this paper being to encourage the telling and adaptive retelling of the story of trauma. The author shares examples of language and communication given by clients in the adaptive description of traumatic experiences which form the foundation of ongoing healing.

Lessons Learned

Summary Psychotherapy exerts effects on both therapist and client. This article describes personal and professional lessons learned by a clinical psychologist in the course of outpatient therapy and consultation at a community health center. The effects of listening to stories of major trauma, the resilience of human spirit and relationships, the role of the therapist's feelings in psychotherapy, and the power of therapeutic interventions arc discussed.

Impact of recounting trauma stories on the emotional state of Cambodian refugees.

Twenty Cambodian refugees with premigration histories of trauma received an average of 16 sessions of individual therapy from a Cambodian bicultural counselor at a trauma treatment center in Sydney, Australia. Nineteen of the 20 patients reported that during treatment they had been willing to talk about their trauma histories, a finding that raises doubts about the commonly held belief that Asians are not psychologically minded and avoid disclosing emotionally sensitive information to health care workers. However, self-disclosing therapy alone did not appear to benefit these patients. Only four patients found talking about their trauma story directly helpful in improving their emotional state, and three of the four found the relief to be transitory.

Psychosocial Needs of Torture Survivors

Growing recognition that the world faces a modern epidemic of torture has stimulated widespread interest amongst mental health professionals in strategies for the treatment of survivors. In this article we outline the distinctive experiences of torture survivors who present for treatment in western countries. These survivors are usually refugees who, in addition to torture, have suffered a sequence of traumatic experiences and face ongoing linguistic, occupational, financial, educational and cultural obstacles in their country of resettlement. Their multiple needs call into question whether "working through" their trauma stories in psychotherapy will on its own ensure successful psychosocial rehabilitation. Drawing on our experience at a recently established service, we propose a broader therapeutic aim.

9 - The Use of the Vacuum Extractor To Accelerate the First and Second Stages of Labour

The vacuum extractor offers advantages which cannot be obtained with any other instrument in certain types of assisted delivery. When delivery is required before the end of the first stage, caesarean section is the method of choice where the cervix is not more than five cm dilated. When dilatation has proceeded beyond this stage however, vacuum extraction can usually effect completion of dilatation and delivery with safety for mother and child and often with surprising and gratifying speed, so that in this, as in other situations, its use in fetal distress is of great value. The second main special indication for vacuum extraction is in malrotation of the head, and its particular advantages here lie in its greater safety for both mother and baby, permitting rotation to occur in a near-physiological manner, at whatever level and in whatever direction would occur naturally, in contrast to the imposed mechanism applied when either manual or forceps rotation is chosen. It can overcome minor but not major cephalo-pelvic disproportion, and as this condition is not always recognised before delivery is undertaken, failure from this cause may arise from time to time, and recourse may be necessary to caesarean section or more rarely to forceps. In relation to low or outlet deliveries it offers no great advantage. Nevertheless, the vacuum extractor may offer a solution to many of the problems which may arise in the active management of labour. Stories of trauma to the fetal head, which are almost as horrific as of that ascribed to the forceps, are an indication of bad case selection and poor technique. If properly used, with due regard to the restrictions discussed above, to the minutiae of proper technique and to careful maintenance of the apparatus, the instrument will be found to be safe and effective, in many cases enabling successful completion of delivery more rapidly and earlier than can be achieved with either caesarean section or the obstetric forceps.