Trauma and Uprooting

Diana Miserez

Description

We live in a world that most regrettably, despite its potential in terms of beauty and variety, has been and is still dominated by multiple outbreaks of violence. For the last hundred years and more, people have been forced into situations in which they have lost everything that they had held dear, often including their mental health. Trauma and Uprooting focuses on the trauma caused by people's unimaginable suffering and by their having to abandon homes and everything that they once knew.Until the late 1970s there was an almost total ignorance worldwide of what psychological damage people might have suffered afterliving through traumatic experiences. But since the overdue and energetic exploration of psychological harm and its effects by anumber of brilliant psychiatrists and other specialists, there have been great steps forward. And as a result, it has become apparent thatpeople who suffer symptoms of post traumatic stress disorders (now increasingly recognized by the initials PTSD) can entertain hopes ofbeing cured.Following descriptions of some of the highly traumatizing events that have bedevilled our world, the last two chapters of this bookattempt to describe the extensive research and experience of senior psychiatrists who have discovered ways of reversing the effects ofthe PTSD that can make people's lives a nightmare. A must read for anyone interested in the effects of trauma on the psyche - all themore now that we are up against the additional horror of Covid-19.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800467699
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Diana Miserez

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
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concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781800467699

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To all who have suffered violence and loss

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1
Who Is Affected By Trauma? A Litany Of Suffering Over The Last 100 Years
Chapter 2
My Family and Trauma Related to the War Years
Chapter 3
The Holocaust
Chapter 4
The Life and Work of Dr Helen Bamber, OBE (1925–2014)
Chapter 5
Trauma, Psychiatric Harm and Litigation
Chapter 6
Organized Violence: Torture and its Consequences
Chapter 7
Human Rights
Chapter 8
Coups d’Etat in Chile and Argentina
Chapter 9
Solidarity and Hope
Chapter 10
Cambodia
Chapter 11
Laos and Vietnam
Chapter 12
South East Asian Refugees and Mental Health
Chapter 13
Faith, Hope and Courage – The Great Strengths of Refugees
Chapter 14
Rwanda – Ethnic Violence and Genocide
Chapter 15
Children
Chapter 16
“Ethnic Cleansing”, Uprooting and Genocide in Europe
Chapter 17
Rape as a Weapon of War in Kivu (Congo)
Chapter 18
Victims of Terrorists in Northern Iraq
Chapter 19
Discoveries: Research and Practice, 1978 Onwards
Chapter 20
Part I – Towards healing
Part II – The remarkable expansion in the consciousness of trauma worldwide
Annex 1a
Conclusions and recommendations 1–20 of the Red Cross Workshop on Psychological Problems of Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Vitznau, Switzerland, 6–11 October 1987
Annex 1b
A Red Cross and Red Crescent Guide: working with Victims of Organised Violence from Different Cultures (1995 – second part)
Annex 1c
Community Based Psychological Support, A Training Manual, IFRC, 1st edition, January 2003; IFRC Framework for Community Resilience, 2018
Annex 2
United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture – what the Fund does

Bibliography

Acknowledgements
There are many people to whom I am indebted in relation to the writing of this book. Above all, there have been researchers and practitioners who have generously agreed to my quoting quite substantial portions of their texts. I wish to mention, first and foremost, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whose ground breaking book The Body Keeps the Score tells the whole story of how in the 1970s alarming phenomena of post-traumatic stress became apparent but were very far from being understood – and then how, in the course of a few years, he and other psychiatrists plumbed the depths of these phenomena, making some extraordinary discoveries. I wish to thank very warmly a number of doctors for allowing me to bring many of their findings into this book, especially Dr van der Kolk, of course, and Drs Richard F. Mollica, Judith L. Herman, Inger Agger, Peter Handford, Heide Rieder and Thomas Ebert. Then there is a host of other authors, whose texts bring to life a variety of situations, not least Nadia Murad, who depicts the horror of the IS genocide of the Yazidis of northern Iraq in August 2014, and Colette Braeckman and others, who depict the remarkable work of Dr Mukwege in the teeth of the danger and horror of mass rapes of women in Kivu. I wish I could thank them all in person!
Finally, I thank my daughter and two lifelong friends for encouraging me to keep on writing this account, and thank Matador for taking on the production of this rather long book.

Introduction
Many of us are far from sanguine about the way things are going nowadays on this planet – quite apart from the recent appearance of the horrifying Coronavirus – “COVID-19” – which has radically changed the way people of practically every nation are thinking and behaving, and which is causing unprecedented stress, distress and trauma – in the medical services as well as in the general public.
By the time this book appears in print, we dare hope that the fight against this obscene virus is being won on all fronts, and not only in China and Singapore. But at the time of writing, the news is terrifyingly sombre, and this makes it difficult to concentrate as fully as before on the theme of trauma and uprooting. We must, however, proceed!
The belated recognition of trauma
We believe that the world could be a far better place, but all too much of the news is disquieting, and, alas, too many people – we ourselves, perhaps, or people we know – suffer from one form or another of trauma. And trauma and post-traumatic stress are very difficult to live with.
This book came to be written to show how universal trauma has now become, with a principal focus on man-made events that have forced millions of people to be uprooted from their homes, and often from their countries. Euripides said in 431 bc , “There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.” We know that this sorrow was felt by people wrenched away over centuries by Arabs and Europeans from their surroundings in Africa and forced into slavery, and by natives of the American continent whose lands were confiscated by Europeans who intruded and forcibly dominated people of many tribes who over thousands of years had created their own civilisations.
One need not necessarily read all the long and disturbing accounts of how, at various times between 1914 and the present, considerable devastation came about in all parts of Europe, Chile, Argentina, the former Indochina, Rwanda, Congo and northern Iraq (apart from the other recent and even contemporary scenes of horror, such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan…) as a result of fascism, political extremism and religious intolerance. But we have to recognize that the extreme forms of violence described in this book affected (or in some cases may still affect) whole populations with unavoidable psychological and physiological consequences that have been truly recognized only over the last thirty to forty years. So, whether or not we bring ourselves to plunge into the painful history of our world’s last hundred or so years, we should read about the research undertaken and the experience gained since 1978. That will bring us to reflect not only on the suffering but also on the resilience of the human spirit, described by researcher-practitioners, abler authors than I, in fascinating books that I very warmly recommend.
Why especially 1978? Well, in July of that year a former combat soldier of the American armed forces came to a young Dutch psychiatrist working at the Boston Veterans Administration Clinic asking for help over the alarming behaviour that he had inexplicably and suddenly developed years after leaving Vietnam – namely manifestations of what later came to be called post-traumatic stress disorders, PTSD. Dr Bessel van der Kolk was totally perplexed, but he was determined to get to grips with the phenomenon and find ways of helping the perturbed young man, who it very soon turned out was one of many “vets” in similarly deep trouble. In parallel, other psychiatrists and practitioners such as the highly experienced American psychiatrists Dr Judith Lewis Herman and Dr Richard F. Mollica were turning their attention to this whole new area of investigation: trauma – massive, severe or acute trauma – what its causes and manifestations are and how its effects can be alleviated. In fact, they have virtually given their lives to this hitherto ignored area of work. Their invaluable findings, recorded in exceptionally valuable books that will loom large in the fina