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Progress mental and behavioral health

While biological correlations to mental and behavioral health challenges exist, there is substantial evidence that social, political, economic, and environmental conditions heavily influence the emergence of such challenges and related outcomes among individuals, communities, systems, and populations.

 

Emerging wisdom on the social determinants of mental health illuminates the connection of many mental and behavioral health concerns to exposure to traumatic stress, imploring further exploration of the true etiology of such conditions. CTIPP is committed to a robust, cross-system, cross-sector, multi-pronged approach to addressing, healing, and preventing further trauma from occurring.

CTIPP SUPPORTS:

  • Engage in efforts to shift the dominant discourse away from stigma, pathology, individual moral failing, bias, and shame toward trauma-informed narratives that acknowledge trauma and its impacts and honor the resilience and wisdom that lived experience begets

  • Support and fund the development of tools and resources to enhance awareness about resources available to address and prevent trauma and re-traumatization

  • Increase equitable access to quality trauma-informed mental and behavioral health supports

  • Require training and education on trauma, its impacts, and trauma-informed approaches to addressing mental and behavioral health issues among the workforce

  • Prioritize funding for entities that provide trauma-informed, trauma-responsive, and trauma-specific interventions to those who experience challenges with mental and behavioral health-related factors

  • Encourage providers and service delivery systems to adopt a harm reduction approach to addressing mental and behavioral health challenges with attention to structural inequalities such as racism, poverty, and other forms of bias, oppression, and marginalization

  • Identify and work to fill gaps in prevention and early intervention programs and services, particularly in trauma-impacted communities or areas populated heavily by groups or populations that research demonstrates as being more likely to experience trauma

  • Fund opportunities for people with lived experience to attend trauma-informed peer support groups, as well as pursue pathways for paid professional positions facilitating peer support groups to address mental and behavioral health challenges and conditions

  • Engage in outreach and education related to disproportionalities and disparities related to mental and behavioral health conditions, as well as the connection such conditions have to trauma exposure, particularly among multiply-impacted individuals, populations, and communities

  • Expand training for assessing and screening for trauma as well as for providing appropriate referrals, with an emphasis on reducing the likelihood of re-traumatization among staff and service users alike

  • Provide instrumental and technical support to facilitate service systems creating the context and conditions for safety, trustworthiness, transparency, empowerment, voice, choice, and other key elements of trauma-informed recovery to emerge both within the workforce as well as among the community members who access mental and behavioral health services and supports

  • Incentivize and enable reimbursement of trauma-informed, trauma-responsive, and trauma-specific evidence-based, evidence-informed, and promising interventions--including traditional cultural healing practices—demonstrated to address mental and behavioral health symptomology

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