With over 50 years of mental health recovery, I was flourishing. In my mid-fifties, I had my first full time job in years. I was working using knowledge and experiences from academic training and my personal recovery. I felt secure in my ability to overcome life challenges. I was proud of the effort I invested in my recovery and my work with a group of knowledgeable and passionate folks helping others overcome the challenges of homelessness, mental illness, trauma, and substance abuse.
Too often, trauma research focuses solely on impact on patients in health services—especially people who experience mental illness, trauma, substance use disorders, and homelessness. We need to expand the research questions to include the following: How does trauma impact physicians and what are the implications for their relationships with patients?
Security. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I grew up in a home marked by addiction, dysfunction, and for a period of time, poverty. While I knew my parents loved me, my father’s alcoholism set the tone for much of my childhood. As I got older, left home, and engaged in my own much healthier relationships, I thought I had escaped unscathed. In many ways, my sibling took away some of the more common traits of being raised by an alcoholic parent, but I didn’t seem to carry these with me.
We know that healthcare disparities exist! Statistics can tell us where disparities are occurring, which providers have the worst outcomes, and what medical decisions are contributing to the problem.
Resolving healthcare disparities is hampered when we refuse to ask hard questions about conscious and unconscious bias among service providers and staff. For example, research on obesity has documented that physician attitudes greatly impact service use, quality, and outcomes. Studies on the impact of physician attitudes demonstrate that examining bias is critical for understanding how patients use services and how well they do.
