Qualitative Exploration of Trauma Experience and Posttraumatic Support of Community Mental Health Professionals

Background: The study purpose was to describe experience of violence and trauma, needs for support of community mental health professionals (CMHP). Methods: This study had a qualitative descriptive design and qualitative content analysis was used. For data collection, focus group interviews were carried out with 18 CMHP in 3 groups. Results: Data analysis has been extracted in to 5 domains (safety, stress, coping, support, protection), 9 categories (primary trauma, secondary trauma, negative emotion, burnout, workload, ineffective response, trust and understanding, foundation for protection and empowerment) and 14 subcategories. Conclusions: From the findings, we could know it more clearly that the community mental health field is relatively high in the risk of violence, suicide case and death of the subjects. However, the pre- post-response measures for the protection of CMHP who has been violently traumatized were very insufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare psychological emotional support system along with preventive and post-response measures for safety at the individual and institutional level. At the same time, it is important to create a supportive environment at the peer and organizational level. As a results we proposed that rapid preparation of the materialization of emotional support system for CMHP, mandatory application of two-person-one intervention principle, preparation of guidelines for emergency response, improvement of physical environment for safety, improvement of understanding on mental health work of institutional officials and also supervision ability of mental health senior staffs, strengthening education and supervision system for enhancement CMHP’s capacity are necessary.