UCSF Trauma Recovery Center - "A Haven from Trauma’s Cruel Grip"
The New York Times reports on the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center (TRC), a multidisciplinary team of mental health professionals that helps trauma victims "surmount the psychic hurdle between 'victim' and 'survivor'. For survivors of violent injury, the psychological effects often outlast the physical damage. Mental health issues like PTSD, anxiety, and depression can be significant barriers to recovery from traumatic injury. Moreover, the fear of the stigma sometimes associated with seeking out mental health treatment makes treatment even more difficult.
Partnering with TRC, the San Francisco Wraparound Project at ZSFG utilizes community-based interventions tailored to the unique culture of the community, with the goal of preventing further violence. These efforts have been very beneficial, providing mental health services to over 85% of Wraparound clients in need of it. Catherine Juillard, MD, MPH, Director of the Wrapraround Project, extolled the NY Times efforts in showcasing the work of the TRC and similar programs around the country, calling it "a strong piece about a fantastic program".
San Francisco — The sun was preternaturally bright the day Clare Senchyna’s 26 year-old son Camilo, her only child, was shot and killed in a random act of violence in San Francisco.
On that morning two years ago, Ms. Senchyna drew the orange curtains in her bedroom, pulled up her blankets and stayed in bed for much of the next several months. It seemed to her an appropriate response to the end of the world.
Her son, an emergency medical technician, had been out celebrating the completion of his paramedic classes when he was murdered across the street from Ms. Senchyna’s favorite yoga studio. A single mom and urgent care nurse practitioner, Ms. Senchyna began drinking heavily, plying herself with sleeping pills, and felt suicidal enough to commit herself to a local hospital before quickly determining that “a psych ward is not a place for grief.”
Too many friends stayed away, as if losing a child to murder might be contagious. Eventually, she worked up the courage to call the Trauma Recovery Center, a pathbreaking program of the University of California, San Francisco that provides kaleidoscopic care for victims of violent crime and their families.
For Ms. Senchyna, 62, whose vivid blue-green eyes set off her salt and pepper hair, the center, about ten blocks from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, with which it is affiliated, was a portal for re-entering the world.
She has since become an anti-gun advocate. “It demolishes your life,” she said about her son’s murder. “The center was someplace I could come and be safe and sit with the horror and not be judged,” she said.
Starting as a pilot project with a small state grant in 2001, the center’s all-encompassing approach to trauma recovery and prevention – for survivors of gun violence, sexual assault, hate crimes and other violent offenses — has become a national model.
The concept is now being replicated across California; seven new centers up and running or in the works — including three in Los Angeles and others in Stockton, Long Beach and Oakland. Other states are following suit. The Ohio attorney general recently announced a $2.6 million effort to launch five trauma recovery centers modeled on San Francisco’s, and in Illinois, where Chicago homicides have reached record numbers, a criminal justice reform bill just signed into law includes similar services.
Along with a growing number of hospital-based violence intervention programs, the new centers acknowledge the link between violence and public health, as well as the insidious ripple effects that untreated trauma can have on public safety. The likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime — and a repeat victim — increases exponentially for low-income people of color underage 30, the very population least likely to seek help.
A trauma recovery center offers one-stop shopping of sorts, in which mental health professionals trained in trauma help vulnerable people surmount the psychic hurdle between “victim” and “survivor.”
In addition to therapy, clinicians help them navigate the stultifying maze that faces a violent crime victim, whether it is filing a police report, testifying against a perpetrator, applying for victim compensation, relocating to a safer neighborhood or simply summoning up the strength to leave the house. (If they have not yet done so, a therapist will visit).
Left untreated, trauma makes victims more susceptible to depression, substance abuse, unhealthy relationships or difficulties holding down a job. It increases the likelihood of becoming violent themselves, erasing the razor-thin line between victim and perpetrator. As Sammy Nunez, the founder of Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, the nonprofit that houses Stockton’s new Trauma Recovery Center, aptly put it: “Hurt people hurt people.”