An Overview of Trauma-Informed Care: Interview with Nancy Smyth, Ph.D.

Episode 80: Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast looks at Trauma Informed Care, one of the most promising approaches to working with people without causing additional trauma. And I had the honor of talking about Trauma-informed care with Nancy Smyth, professor and Dean of the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo. There are three reasons why Nancy was the perfect guest for today's topic. First, she understands what it means to address trauma at the micro, mezzo, and macro level. She has worked in both mental health and addiction treatment settings for over 35 years as a clinician, manager, educator, researcher, and program developer. Second, she's what we like to call a “content” expert. She is a Board Certified Expert in Traumatic Stress. Her research, teaching, and practice focuses on trauma, substance abuse, and on working with people recovering from those experiences, including the use of innovative treatment approaches like EMDR and mindfulness meditation. In today's episode, we talked about Nancy's interest in TIC. She identified the basic assumptions behind Trauma-informed care. She clarified the relationship between a trauma-informed approach to working with clients and specific empirically supported treatments for people with trauma histories, and treatment for people with PTSD. She talked about some of the ways that she has translated trauma-informed principles into micro-level treatment practices. We ended with resources for people who are interested in learning more about Trauma-Informed Care, including a bunch of episodes on the inSocialWork podcast series. If you want to find additional references and resources, as well as a transcript of my conversation with Nancy, please go to the Social Work Podcast website at socialworkpodcast.com. You can connect with other social workers at the Social Work Podcast Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/swpodcast, or follow the Twitter feed http://www.twitter.com/socworkpodcast. You can listen to the Social Work Podcast from socialworkpodcast.com, by downloading the episodes through iTunes or any number of other apps, or you can stream the 10 most recent episodes right from your mobile device using the Stitcher Radio mobile app http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/social-work-podcast/the-social-work-podcast.