Good Practice

This blog post talks about one of many aspects of trauma that is often forgotten: the context of our lives and how that impacts our experience of trauma. Trauma is at the heart of much of what we think of as ‘mental illness’ I write a lot about trauma on this blog. That’s because one of the most important things I learned during my healing was that none of the psychiatric labels, medications or ECT I was given dealt with the fundamental issue at the heart of my distress: trauma. Yes, I heard voices, I had unusual beliefs. Yes, I self-harmed and attempted suicide. But while psychiatry sees those experiences as signs of illness, for me they were something much more human. They were a normal response to some very extreme, traumatic experiences. In my early childhood I experienced neglect and physical violence from my primary caregiver. And at the […]