Why trauma informed?

Trauma-Informed care is a philosophy for recovery that combines the conditions and needs of people recovering from mental illness and/or substance abuse into one framework. This framework combines all of the elements of the Recovery Approach and adds an awareness of trauma.

Advocates of trauma-informed care argue the principles and strategies should be applied to individuals experiencing mental illness, substance dependence, and trauma as these three often occur simultaneously or as result of each other.

The paradigms surrounding trauma-informed care began to shift in 1998 and 1999. In 1998, the Center for Mental Health Services, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention collaborated to fund 14 sites to develop integrated services in order to address the interrelated effects of violence, mental health, and substance abuse.

[40] 

In 1999, the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors passed a resolution recognizing the impact of violence and trauma no and developed a toolkit of resources for the implementation of trauma services in state mental health agencies.

.[15] 

Trauma-informed care has been supported in academia as well. Scholars claim that neglecting the role of trauma in a person's story can interfere with recovery in the form of misdiagnosis, inaccurate treatment, or retraumatization.

[19][17][14][21][40][16] 

Some principles of trauma-informed care include validating survivor experiences and resiliency, aiming to increase a survivor's control over her/his/their recovery, creating atmospheres for recovery that embody consistency and confidentiality, minimizing the possibilities of triggering past trauma, and integrating survivors/recovering persons in service evaluation.

21][15][14][17] 

In practice, trauma-informed care has shown to be most effective when every participant in a service providing context to be committed to following these principles.

19][17] 

In addition, these principles can apply to all steps of the recovery process within a service providing context, including outreach and engagement, screening, advocacy, crisis intervention, and resource coordination.

15][21][14][16][17] 

The overall goal in trauma-informed care is facilitating healing and empowerment using strengths-based empowerment practices and a comprehensive array of services that integrate co-occurring disorders and the multitude of needs a recovering person might have, such as drug treatment, housing, relationship building, and parenting support.

Our services use the recovery model