I think that similarly to mental illness, ‘trauma’ is starting to lose its meaning, and that this drives genuinely traumatised people further and further underground and they are disengaging more and more.
It skews public perceptions especially as it relates to functional impairment and it increases the stigma of people that are left permanently scarred and functionally disabled. You only have to have a social media account for a very short amount of time to see how trauma has been redefined as any hurt, pain or grief that comes to pretty much every life if you are lucky enough to live that long.
The practical impacts of this are that we are made to feel like criminals whenever engaging with public services and a lot of people fall through the cracks because the government thinks we are a bunch of frauds. According to Facebook and Twitter trauma and mental illness is society wide so how do governments tell the real deal from the self-described.....they put everyone through the ringer until they break them and guess who breaks first. The real deals, and some end up on the street.
I had the horrifying realisation last year that one of my friends has lied about domestic violence involving her husband to secure housing. If she was smart she would have lied to someone who hadn’t been raised in a soup of it. You’d think that I would say something to her, but it just makes me feel so empty, powerless and mute.
I think one of the biggest challenges for organisations like Blue Knot is engaging with people that have had defeat burnt into their cells, because we give up, especially if we meet people that are gaming the system and getting away with it. When you have been physically over-powered, repeatedly, over and over again and every adult in your life has been complicit it becomes a biological reflex to say nothing, walk away or disappear into the background because you have learnt that you will always lose.
I think that as a general comment, more has to be done to educate the public about the role of women in child abuse and female abuser’s in general, as paedophiles and paedophile’s accomplices, or hiding paedophile rings in plain sight. They fly under the radar and are not often suspected.
I think that the mental health act fails the community in defining someone potentially dangerous as only being possible if they are experiencing psychosis. I think that with some diagnoses, such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, psychiatrists should stop teaming up with psychologist’s and start collaborating with neurologists. If you have ever lived with someone with this condition who is simultaneously an abusive person you would know that it is structural and intractable from the ‘snap’. They can snap in and out of states faster than the speed of light and it has nothing to do with feelings or emotions that take time to dissipate, they just flick a couple of brain switches similar to blinking. Hence the ease with which they calm down once they have regained control over you.
Until structural changes come about it is hard to be postive.
