Description
Book SynopsisFor the last thirty years, the nation''s mental health and social service systems have been under relentless assault, with dramatically rising costs and the fragmentation of service delivery rendering them incapable of ensuring the safety, security, and recovery of their clients. The resulting organizational trauma both mirrors and magnifies the trauma-related problems their clients seek relief from. Just as the lives of people exposed to chronic trauma and abuse become organized around the traumatic experience, so too have our social service systems become organized around the recurrent stress of trying to do more under greater pressure: they become crisis-oriented, authoritarian, disempowered, and demoralized, often living in the present moment, haunted by the past, and unable to plan for the future.Complex interactions among traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and a social and economic climate that is often hostile to recovery efforts recreate the very expe
Table of ContentsPrologue ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: Human Service Delivery Organizations: Dead or Alive? ; Chapter 2: "I Gotta Get out of This Place": Workplace Stress as a Threat to Public Health ; Chapter 3: When Terror Becomes a Way of Life ; Chapter 4: Parallel Processes and Trauma-Organized Systems ; Chapter 5: Lack of Basic Safety ; Chapter 6: Loss of Emotional Management ; Chapter 7: Organizational Learning Disabilities, Organizational Amnesia, and Decision-Making Under Stress ; Chapter 8: Miscommunication, Conflict, and Organizational Alexithymia ; Chapter 9: Authoritarianism, Disempowerment, and Learned Helplessness ; Chapter 10: Punishment, Revenge, and Organizational Injustice ; Chapter 11: Unresolved Grief, Reenactment, and Decline ; Chapter 12: Restoring Sanctuary: Organizations as Living, Complex Adaptive Social Systems ; References ; Index
