Trauma Counselling Services

The human response to psychological trauma is one of the most important public health problems in the world. Traumatic events such as family and social violence, rapes and assaults, disasters, wars, accidents, and predatory violence confront people with such horror and threat that it may temporarily or permanently alter their capacity to cope, their biological threat perception, and their concepts of themselves.

Traumatised individuals frequently develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a disorder in which the memory of the traumatic event comes to dominate the victims' consciousness, depleting their lives of meaning and pleasure. Trauma does not only affect psychological functioning: for example, a study of almost 10,000 patients in a medical setting reported that persons with histories of severe child maltreatment showed a 4-12 times greater risk for developing alcoholism, depression, drug abuse, and suicide attempts, a 2-4 times greater risk for smoking, higher than 50 sex partners, sexually transmitted disease, a 1.4-1.6 times greater risk for obesity, and a 1.6-2.9 times greater risk for heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, hepatitis, stroke, diabetes, and liver disease.