The Impact of Trauma, Adversity and Violence on Social Health

Dear Colleagues,

Beginning in the 1980s, with the impact of traumatic stress on returning veterans, survivors of natural disasters, victims of rape and childhood sexual abuse and victims of gun violence, the field of traumatic stress studies was launched in 1985. Since then, the field has expanded significantly, especially after the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study was published in 1998 that clearly established the relationship between childhood exposure to overwhelming events and adult disease and dysfunction. In the last three decades, there has been a growing awareness of how widespread exposure to trauma, adversity and violence in the general population and in every system that comprises our societies. This has led to a growing recognition that population mental health cannot be significantly improved without taking into account the physical, psychological, social, moral and cultural effects of this exposure and the multiple ways that individuals with serious trauma-related problems show up in all of our social systems.

The last two decades have seen an emergence of increased awareness and intervention in the field of trauma responsive practice. The current literature has effectively expanded our understanding of trauma-informed care from having a sole focus on addressing the behavioral health needs of symptomatic patients seeking help from mental health practitioners to recognizing the needs of staff in every institution who are routinely confronted with the effects of trauma on their service delivery as well as impacts on the organizational climate and culture in which services take place. The United States Surgeon General's Report of 2022 has made this point clear by centering on the importance of the overall organizational climate of the workplace—all workplaces.

This Special Issue aims to further advance the literature on trauma-informed and trauma-responsive services beyond its current concentration on the impact of trauma and violence on mental health of individuals to a more expansive centering on the overall social health. We conceptualize social health as the relational and developmental functioning of individuals, families and communities within their social environments, including mental health, healthcare, education, justice, social and traditional media and employment, as well as a wide range of social service and healthcare sectors directed at children, families and adults. Despite the reality that many trauma survivors end up presenting to many different components of the overall system, the systems that determine much of the social health of our nations do not connect in any significant way with each other, nor is there necessarily a shared knowledge base that would support and encourage more meaningful connections.

The accumulated knowledge that we now have about the widespread impact of trauma, adversity and violence provides the knowledge base, and yet much of the understanding of what it really means to our various systems and how they must change to truly become "trauma-informed" and "trauma-responsive" remains oversimplified. Training in the existing knowledge about trauma, adversity and violence and the effects on mind, body and social development is essential, but so are changes in leadership style and skills so that leaders at every level of our systems that determine social health can also respond appropriately to the people who work for them and those they serve. The intention of this volume is to explore what constitutes this basic PARADIGM SHIFT by defining the current basic assumptions that inform each component of our social system—the mental models that have historically informed each part of the system, how those basic assumptions change when the knowledge we now have about the impact of trauma, adversity and violence is assimilated into each system and what that implies for the future. This Special Issue reflects the experiential, theoretical and conceptual contributions of authors who are exploring the practical applications of trauma-responsive knowledge, skills and interventions and the impacts of these applications on humanity's collective social health.

Dr. Sandra Bloom
Prof. Dr. Charles R. Figley
Prof. Dr. Mariana Chilton
Guest Editors

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• trauma
• adversity
• violence
• mental health