Tagged With "Pandemic response"

Building a resilient workplace begins by recognizing the importance of connections and relationships at work including leaders, supervisors, and staff. A Vicarious Trauma Informed Organization recognizes the challenges human service professionals face and addresses the impact of vicarious trauma and disaster mental health. Through an organization’s policies and practices, an employee’s resilience is fostered. Your mission statement can recognize the need for self-care. The goal of...

By Jessica Dym Bartlett, Jessica Griffin, Dana Thomson, Child Trends, March 19, 2020 The following guidance, recommendations, and resources are provided by child trauma experts at Child Trends and the Child Trauma Training Center at the University of Massachusetts. The Center is housed at the University of Massachusetts with Child Trends as the lead evaluating agency, with funding from SAMHSA and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and additional support from HRSA. While the Centers...

NASW sponsored Webinar: Thursday, March 26, 12 - 1:30 EST Illness and pandemics can produce far-reaching mental health effects. This webinar examines who in the community is most at-risk for worsening mental health in the wake of illness, isolation, quarantine, and instability and how to help them cope. It also considers what types of mental health responses should be mobilized in order to meet needs. Presenter: Karen Zilberstein, LICSW , Clinical Director of the Northampton, Massachusetts...

By Solomon Greene, Martha Galvez, Corianne Payton Scally, et al., Housing Matters, April 22, 2020 The first weeks of the COVID-19 crisis have brought widespread unemployment that many believe will get worse, especially for low-income renters . State and local governments are on the front lines responding to the housing needs of households affected by COVID-19, but they are working without a clear playbook for delivering housing assistance at this unprecedented scale and are relying on local...

By Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Psychotherapy.net, March 19, 2020 I walked into the grocery store Sunday morning after a relaxing run. As soon as I came in the doors, I saw the headline of the newspaper in bold letters reporting that New York was in a state of emergency. Anxiety coursed through me. Earlier that same morning, I’d had a phone session with a patient who was becoming increasingly anxious due to news of the spread of COVID-19. She was starting to feel like she couldn’t leave the house.

By Sandro Galea and Salma M. Abdalla, JAMA Network, June 12, 2020 More than 110 000 people have died in the US because of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, a pathogen that was unknown just 6 months ago. Ubiquitous fear and anxiety that accompanied the emergence of the new coronavirus led to widespread limits on physical contact in attempts to mitigate the spread of the virus. That in turn brought the US economy to a halt, resulting in more than 40 million people filing for...

Based on a longer white paper, this blog offers COVID-specific adaptations to trauma-informed approaches to improve human services that moved to the virtual space.

Like many of you, I’m a bit out of sorts and somewhat disoriented right now. Our collective mental health is deteriorating during Covid-19. Recent stats report an increase from 20-40% of adults struggling with mental illness since the advent of the pandemic. Maternal mental health is particularly at risk. Helping children with distance learning, navigating exposure to the news, trying to keep life a bit “normal”, keeping family members fed and supplied, juggling career and income loss, all...

The pandemic has forced professionals and their organizations to practice without a relevant playbook. Reactive attention to suffering for high volumes of critically ill patients many with limited chance of survival, have replaced proactive dialogues on pain relief, symptom management, and quality of life. Trauma-informed practices have never been more vital to understand and render across populations.

“It’s so important that we all speak up on mental health.”- Anne-Marie Mental health still remains a taboo in most parts of the world. People are afraid to talk about their struggles because they fear that they won’t be understood and will be ridiculed. As a result, they don’t speak about their struggles and suffer silently. But, now with the prevalence of the pandemic, the world has also witnessed a mental health crisis. People are speaking about the anxiety and depressive episodes...

Abstract Trauma is rooted in an individual’s experience of an event that leads to physical or mental harm and can have a long-lasting, unfavorable effect on their well-being and functioning. Being aware of the effects of trauma, recognizing its signs, understanding how it informs individual responses, and actively trying to prevent re-traumatization are the tenets of trauma-informed care. Admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is widely considered to be an extremely stressful...