The review urges mental health staff to “take more of an interest in the lives of the people they are trying to help”
Research, led by a University of Liverpool psychologist, has found strong support for the theory that early childhood trauma, such as abuse and neglect, could lead to the development of psychosis in later life.
An international team of researchers reviewed more than 120 reports on the biological mechanisms underlying the relationship between childhood trauma and psychosis.
Social causes
They concluded that people experiencing psychosis should be offered evidence-based psychological therapies that address the social causes of their difficulties.
Anomalies in the brains of people diagnosed with mental health problems such as ‘schizophrenia’ have traditionally been used to support the notion that such problems are biologically based brain disorders that have little to do with life events.
Professor John Read, from the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, said:
“Trauma based brain changes should not be thought of as being indicative of having a brain disorder or disease. The changes are reversible. Recent studies have found, for example, that the brain’s oversensitivity to stressors can be reduced by properly designed psychotherapy.
Interest in lives
“The primary prevention implications are profound. Protection and nurturance of the developing brain in young children would seem to be of paramount importance.
“We hope that this vast body of literature will encourage more mental health staff to take more of an interest in the lives of the people they are trying to help, rather than viewing hearing voices and having unusual beliefs as mere symptoms of an ‘illness’ that need to be suppressed with medication.”
The review, published in Neuropsychiatry, was conducted by researchers from the UK, Denmark, Norway and the USA.
It is about time someone published an article as such.
The following is well described, ““more mental health staff to take more of an interest in the lives of the people they are trying to help, rather than viewing hearing voices and having unusual beliefs as mere symptoms of an ‘illness’ that need to be suppressed with medication.â€
The UK is extremely crazed over pill popping for no reason, even for a simple headache, brave it! There are so many labelled diseases but in fact they are temporary traumas and normal affects of maltreatment or other. Pills do not solve these problems, pills do not solve depression; getting a house, job and a life solve depression. Pills do not fix things and on various accounts are extremely harmful providing illness and mental illness. Examples of such pills are contraception pills and anti-depression pills.
In addition a main factor for mental health problems is nutrition. The UK is not supplied with healthy food, diets and most of the population cannot cook or comprehend the importance of a healthy diet. The importance of nutrition to mental health is astonishing. We cannot eat products with harmful additives and substances and we must eat healthy nutritious meals daily. Those whom suffer from strokes and nervous break downs need to take time to rest and -build the repair within the brain via eating health food. However this is a lifestyle which needs to be kept up with not only within a period of one feeling unwell. Homeless individuals lack nutrition and examples of the brain deterioration from lack of nutrition. This may be an extreme example however individuals whom eat a poor diet are not far off from eating no food at all, in fact worse due to the chemical consumption. Those whom eat a healthy diet mixed with a poor diet will feel the bad effects over a longer period of time in many cases and not straight away however the body will deteriorate via all of the chemical drugs placed in food. It would help if supermarkets stocked fresh produce 99% of the time in addition for improved food consumption. However the government need to ban harmful substances within food, a simple revision of the law which can be implemented in a tick.