While road accidents and suicides hit the headlines, people who face the aftermath of such distressing events are forgotten the very next day. Friends and family members of those who have died, or those who have suffered debilitating injuries, struggle to cope with the losses and to return to a normal life. While several medical institutes in Bengaluru offer exemplary service in trauma care, the psychological effects of trauma are given a once-over.
A team of psychologists is trying to change this scenario by running a Trauma Recovery Clinic at the NIMHANS Centre for Wellbeing (NCW), Bengaluru. Run out of a warmly-lit bungalow in a leafy neighbourhood in BTM Layout, the clinic welcomes people who seek solace from difficult life experiences like accidental trauma, intimate partner violence and childhood trauma.
“Trauma patients need to be handled with a great deal of sensitivity and confidentiality,” says L.N. Suman, professor of clinical psychology at NIMHANS, who started the bi-monthly clinic in 2014. “Often, they just want to understand what has happened to them.”
Dr. Suman calls suicide an interpersonal trauma, which can affect anyone close to the victim. “A young man’s parents came to us after he committed suicide. At the first visit, I had to let the mother cry for the whole session. It was only during the second session that the father started to speak,” she recalled.
She described the case of an IT employee from another State, whose wife committed suicide. Being the first to see the body, he was besieged by guilt and struggled to cope with his loss. After a couple of sessions, he began to come to terms with his wife’s death and to not blame himself for what happened.
Kavita Jangam, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at NIMHANS, one of the coordinators for the clinic, says that though there would be several cases of psychological trauma in the city, very few of them get referred to counsellors. “People don’t come forward to talk about the trauma. They don’t know exactly where to seek help from,” Dr. Jangam said.
Counselling for accident victims
Accident victims, who suffer poly trauma or lose motor functions of their lower extremities, spend a long time in hospital. “Such patients have to be counselled as there is a chance they may go into depression,” said Madan Ballal, orthopaedic surgeon at Sanjay Gandhi Institute for Trauma and Orthopaedics, Jayanagar. As months pass and the patient doesn’t recover, the number of visiting relatives drops, and often it is only the parent or siblings at the patient’s bedside. “In case we see patients having psychological problems or going into depression, we refer them to NIMHANS,” he added.
Distress can be second hand
A woman came to the trauma recovery clinic at NCW suffering from sleepless nights and recurring visions after she saw a bus being burnt on a highway in Andhra Pradesh. It turned out that she had secondary trauma, which occurs when a person witnesses or hears about a traumatic experience. “A person’s response to traumatic events strongly depends on their mental makeup,” said L.N. Suman, professor of clinical psychology at NIMHANS. “While other people travelling would have also seen the incident, it affected her more severely,” she said. After narrating in depth her experiences and getting counselling, she was able to stop seeing the visions and started to sleep well.
