Citation

Psychiatry TL. Lancet Psychiatry 2022; 9(6): 423.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00140-7

PMID

35569493

Abstract

In this issue, a Commission on intimate partner violence and mental health, led by Sian Oram, Helen Fisher, and Louise Howard, summarises current knowledge on this crucial topic and lays out a roadmap of recommendations to reduce incidence and aid survivors. The Commission's approach and findings reach much further than simple clinical pathologising--it takes a broad, whole-society view of intimate partner violence and what should be done to improve the lives of survivors. A key element linking the different sections of the Commission is the concept of trauma and the need for trauma-informed care from individual providers all the way through whole mental health systems. As Oram and colleagues note, there is still much to be learned about trauma as it relates to intimate partner violence, and even more to be done to transform our systems to deal with trauma adequately. Although the focus of the Commission is on intimate partner violence, it provides important insights for dealing with individual traumas and the collective trauma whole communities are experiencing in the aftermath of COVID-19, wars and mass civilian displacement, and the increasing toll of climate change. Below, we highlight a few of the challenges raised in the Commission, and recommendations for improvement, as they relate to the broader topic of trauma.

Current measures of intimate partner violence and its mental health ramifications are inadequate. The Commission highlights how the variety of tools available to measure exposure to intimate partner violence (and the resulting heterogeneity of data), combined with mixed evidence on these tools' validity and usefulness in different cultural and other contexts, have probably contributed to the paucity of measurement of exposure in clinical and research settings...

Language: en