Week 4-Blog Post

Reframing violence against women and trauma as health issues reinforces our understanding of health, illness, and medicine by assuming they are something you can change and treat. We think about these issues by assuming that violence against women happens when men misbehave, and then you get trauma, and you get over it. However, when the topic is reframed you have to consider how trauma can affect you physically, which most people don’t know, believe, or understand. This can lead to long term problems, instead of the short-term solutions we want to accept. In addition, intergenerational trauma challenges biochemical, and mechanical models of health in a similar way. Intergenerational trauma affects more than one person in a way, without anyone having to say anything. We normally think that trauma is a psychological thing that comes from a traumatic event, not that the trauma can be passed on through the feeling you get from someone else from their body’s stress signals. So, thinking about trauma and violence against women as a health issue reinforces our idea that trauma has a quick solution, while intergenerational trauma challenges how we think about biochemical models.

To start off, thinking about trauma and violence against women as a health issue reinforces how we currently understand health, illness, and medicine. Right now, when trauma victims come into to visit healthcare workers trauma is seen as something, we can get rid of quickly, it is a short-term problem. This comes from how our biomedicine system works, trying to solve long-term problems with short-term solutions and then having the treat the same thing over and over again(Lecture 1.7). With trauma caused from violence against women, many people don’t realize that very real physical symptoms can arise as well. These can manifest especially hard during birth and in new born babies. These symptoms include, stress, low birth weight, and depression. The problem with this thinking is that when trauma victims do things such as prepare to give birth or experience physical symptoms from trauma, most healthcare workers don’t know how to help and turn to short-term solutions like pills. That is why when we consider this issue as a health issue it only serves to reinforce our previous ideas. If we were to become more educated on the subject and its symptoms, we would be able to offer much better health care to trauma victims.

Secondly, when we consider intergenerational trauma, we challenge how we think about biochemical and mechanical models. Currently, we consider biochemical models to be mostly unrelated to trauma and more related to things like disease and drugs (Lecture 1.7). We also consider external things that we can see. However, when you look at what intergenerational trauma is, which is when the biochemistry of our body reacts with another person’s due to trauma and causes a reaction, this is actually quite untrue. A big part of this challenging comes from originally only considering trauma to be a psychological thing that we can control with pills or small doses of therapy. When we ignore the physical side effects, we turn a blind eye to the rest of the problem. So, in order to fully understand how intergenerational trauma affects the body we must understand how regular trauma affects the body. This would require a big 180 in the way our biomedicine system operates and will be hard to understand and except for many people. This change will come from listening to survivors and victims, as well as other knowledgeable healthcare professionals. By understanding how they have dealt with, feel, and still experience trauma, only then, will we able to see trauma fully.

To conclude, by reframing trauma and violence against women we reinforce how we think about health, illness, and medicine. We only pay attention to what we know and think we can treat quickly, ignoring a big part of the problem, and frustrating victims more. Likewise, when we consider intergenerational trauma, we challenge our biochemical and mechanical models of health. This happens when we deal with trauma, we neglect to look at the full biochemical scope it can affect our body through. To change this thinking would require an immense effort and change in our biomedical system, as well as lots of learning from survivors.

2 thoughts on “Week 4-Blog Post

  1. Hi, Lauren. I appreciated reading your perspective on trauma this week! I definitely agree that our current perception of trauma includes a “quick fix.” When, in reality, trauma is so much more than that. Do you think there is any good that has come from viewing trauma as more of a “health issue?” I think, in a broad span view of it, it might have helped women deal with the idea that they are going through trauma and allow them to accept that there is something wrong. That it is not normal for them to be feeling and dealing with such hard emotions, especially all on their own. I think that our health care system is greatly under-qualified to deal with helping someone through trauma, but just opening up people to talking about their feelings and experiences, I believe, is a step in the right direction. It is clear that the biomedical point of view does not work, but what about a homeopathic or osteopathic take on trauma? Do you think that using a different type of medical practice could help with treating trauma?

  2. You did a great job! I do find it interesting that health has to be framed in a biological frame to be taken as seriously as it should be. The mind and body are the same entity but our culture seperates the two and in the process one becomes significantly devalued.

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