A cure for what ails you?

Our psychotherapy association is again in discussions with the Sensitive Claims Unit of the Accident Claims Corporation in New Zealand. There is pressure from the unit for therapists to provide more significant outcomes from the work they do with sexual abuse victims and a move to make therapy more economically viable because ACC is struggling to resource counselling and therapy. Many thousands of people have been significantly helped by therapy for these issues and sadly many more will qualify each year. One of the difficulties emanates from the way we separate trauma out from the totality of our lives and fund our rehabilitation services in a highly specialised manner. Specialists train and focus on one problem sector. The tendency to set up a label for a set of psychological symptoms and then make that set into a speciality has, on the one hand, helped many people to access excellent help and, on the other, resulted in divided professional services and battles for funding. Health professionals rely on labels, research to provide evidence that categories such as attention deficit disorders actually exist (as if they have a life of their own), and then we watch the category expand until it includes behaviours we had previously thought were quite normal. The worst feature is that labels become part of family life to the point where parents and family members are labelling each other with all sorts of disorders. Then those who believe disorders can be 'cured' ply their trade forgetting it is the whole of life situation that inhibits our readiness to be healthy. There is, of course a real market for instant and guaranteed 'cures'. All manner of parallel health practitioners focus on 'treatments' for single issue ailments and customers sing the praises of 'the treatment that increased my energy', the intervention that finally relaxed me', 'the machine that changed my thinking' or 'the touch that did away with my virus'.That will never change because, when desparate, we look for answers urgently. My own experience with main line medical practitioners has also been variable. At times I have been convinced I was 'cured' of an ailment and at another time I was rushed to the ermergency department because a practitioner had been prescribing dangerous drugs for me for five years. I have also had huge pain relief and health improvements after consulting acupuncturists, natural health practices and homeopaths. There is a need to balance health services and find ways of researching 'traditional' medical science alongside insights emanating from parallel health practitioners. I wonder if the day will come when government health budgets fund professionals who are prepared to work together in teams using social science insights to link the vast array of elements combining to make us unwell. Perhaps we live our lives in ways that attract those elements to us. Of course tragedy must always be funded urgently and in a targeted way. It is the quick response to selected symptoms and the search for instant ameliorations that concerns me. Preventive health measures are not attractive for many people. There is perhaps a solution. Imagine the impact if we visited health centres and were placed into a programme instead of being allocated 'a doctor'. Members of a professional team would advise us according to their research into different aspects of our lives. With input from each one we would end up with an intricate picture linking mind to body, emotions to relationships, spirit to intentionality, viruses to the way we live and tragedies such as sexual abuse to interventions built around more than psychology. We know we live within interconnected systems as individuals and as communities. If social workers were linked with general practitioners, natural health practitioners with psychologists and spiritual advisers, psychiatrists with counsellors and cultural mentors and you and me with convincing preventive health advice, the health and trauma budget might be targeted to reality.