A Biomedical View Dismisses The Human Experience Of Trauma

Only a century ago, the discipline of psychiatry had little in the way of a biomedical understanding of mental illness, causing embarrassment to their medical colleagues. However, they gained enormous social prestige and influence once they defined a scientific body of knowledge. According to Samson (1995, p. 208), “the power of the profession [medicine] depends, at least in part, on the ability to make claims successfully about the scientific value of their work and the way in which their professional knowledge is grounded in precise, accurate and reliable scientific information”. Considerable power was gained as medicine began to define reality, including defining deviance and social disorder. The dominant discourse in mental health (illness) care today is the medicalisation of mental illness and its subsequent biomedical treatment. Organic theories of mental illness appear to be the basis of medical power. Millions of dollars are spent annually pursuing a genetic causation of mental illness and their pharmaceutical treatments. Little research funding is allocated to exploring the impact of childhood trauma as an underlying cause of mental illness despite widespread acceptance of the contribution of trauma to the development of mental illnesses. Medicine operates from a frame of treating and ameliorating disease. This has resulted in an emphasis on diagnosis, biomedical treatment and early discharge from hospital. There is no real attempt to investigate the underlying psychological and social factors that might have led to symptoms we name ‘psychotic’, particularly in acute psychiatric inpatient settings. If we were to apply a trauma‐informed approach to caring for people with mental illness we would begin from a position of inquiring about ‘what happened to you’ rather than ‘what is wrong with you’. This presentation considers the social construction of mental illness according to the dominant paradigm and explores how nurses might begin to resist the status quo and work in trauma‐informed ways rather than remaining colonised by the dominant biomedical frame.