Trauma and Serious Mental Illness

Understanding the experience of individuals with serious mental illness is important for the development of services to promote recovery. Symptoms arising from serious mental illness may predispose a person to experience traumatic events and to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There is also evidence that childhood adversity and trauma are strongly associated with increased risk for serious mental illness. Although many studies have reported higher rates of trauma exposure among persons with serious mental illness compared with the general population, the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of PTSD in most mental health centers remain suboptimal, and traumatic experiences are often overlooked and unaddressed. Lack of diagnosis and treatment may be due to many factors, including lack of training, fear that discussing traumatic experiences may worsen psychiatric symptoms, and concern that other symptoms are more detrimental than those that are trauma related.

The first sections of this month’s Editor’s Choice Collection address how trauma can contribute to the development of serious mental illness and the importance of screening for trauma in this population. The final sections address the impact of trauma on serious mental illness and solutions for treating trauma of people with serious mental illness.