Addressing Trauma: A Vital Component in Behavioral Health

The final podcast of our National Recovery Month series with UPMC Health Plan focused on the subject of trauma and knowledge of its impact on the behavioral health care space, as well as how both have facilitated positive change among health care providers.

In “Sustaining Compassionate Trauma Care Across Communities,” Lyndra Bills, MD, senior medical director, and Shari Hutchison, MS, director of program evaluation and outcomes, both with Community Care Behavioral Health Organization (CCBH), part of the UPMC Insurance Services Division, listeners learned how trauma-informed professionals are better able to meet the complex needs of their communities, which is especially important for the rural populations served by CCBH.

Here we learn more about the work they do, the effects of trauma—more than 90% of adults have experienced a traumatic event at some point in their lifetime—on physical and psychological health, and how addressing trauma has become integral to providing optimal health care services.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

Tell us about your work with Community Care Behavioral Health Organization.

Hutchison: I'm Shari Hutchison, MS, director of program evaluation and outcomes at Community Care Behavioral Health, working in program evaluation and helping providers implement evidence-based practices.

Bills: Hi, my name is Lyndra Bills, MD. I'm a senior medical director with Community Care Behavioral Health, and in my role, I focus on trauma-informed care projects and also physical health/behavioral health integration projects.

Can you explain how and why trauma is a subjective measure?

Hutchison: A traumatic event is really anything that elicits physical or psychological distress, so that is going to vary across individuals and will depend on their coping, ability to cope, their resilience, [and] their experience with different traumatic events. All of those factors might impact that physiological and psychological distress.

How has research on trauma evolved such that addressing it has become necessary to providing optimally effective behavioral health care?

Bills: A lot of key studies have brought everyone kind of up to speed and on the same page about the importance of recognizing the impact of significant traumatic stress for both the individual and organizations. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study would be one of the main ones that many people reference, and it's kind of well recognized and people understand that.

So, that's helped bring everybody in health care—and there's certainly other areas in human services—to the same recognition that certainly not everyone has the same impact from traumatic stress exposure, but when they do, and if it is significant, it can affect them certainly behaviorally, psychologically, but in every domain, and physically. So they can have a lot of physical impact that can then lead to chronic health conditions and more problems for them, as well as the impact on the system or their families.