Trauma and in particular post traumatic stress disorders amongst mental health service users are areas that traditionally psychiatric/mental health nurses refrain from therapeutic engagement with. A stance enforced by training, institutional culture, and a reliance on psychiatric diagnosis to focus our interventions. Over the past fifteeen years there is a changing discourse in mental health that recognisies trauma as central to how people develop symptoms associated with mental illness. Now the evidence shows that the majority of service users are likley to be experiencing some form of post traumatic stress that has a significant contribution to their manifested sympoms (e.g. Hammersley et al. 2007). What was kept beneath the surface from nursing interventions for so long is becoming a bubbling reality that needs reconsidering and a therapeutic response. Whilst not ignoring or negating the need for skilled specialist trauma therapy; psychiatric/mental health nurses by default are in a position to offer support and healing through a range of simple creative evidence based approaches that will aid recovery from unresolved trauma resonses. This workshop will initially offer a presentation on relevant trauma perspeectives that influence peoples trauma response and manifestation of psychological and physical symptoms.
The second part of this worksop will illusrate the human traumatic response: how we recover from trauma; how it may be interrupted; and how it can be reenacted in a variety of forms (Levine, 1997). Following a brief performance simulting trauma reenactment, the remainder of session will engage particpants in a number of evidence based techniques(energy flow, visualisation, breathwork, body work) that enable people to renegotiate trauma and engage in a process of healing. All techniques are those taught as ‘self interventions’ and do not require specialist training in order for nurses to utilise them as part of their tool box of interventions with this increasingly visible group of people in our mental health services.