Evaluating staff training on the trauma model of psychosis and trauma-informed care in a CMHT

Purpose Links between trauma and psychosis have been well evidenced. Trauma has been proposed to underlie psychotic experiences, with the trauma model of psychosis suggesting psychotic experiences represent forms of trauma-related distress. As such, traumatic experiences can be seen symbolised in the content of psychosis experiences. Despite this, Community Mental Health Teams (CMHTs) predominantly operate within a medicalised model, where trauma and trauma-informed care are often neglected. Therefore, staff training was delivered on the trauma model of psychosis and trauma-informed care. This study aims to assess whether the training would improve knowledge and attitude in working with trauma and whether the training would improve staff recognition of the connections between the content of psychosis and previous trauma. Design/methodology/approach The training consisted of an online 1-h session, with measures of trauma-informed care (knowledge and attitude) and trauma-psychosis links (symbolism questionnaire) collected pre- and post-training. The training was open to all 115 staff in the CMHTs, 53 attended, however, only 23 completed both pre- and post-measures. Findings Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed significant differences in pre- and post-performance on both the trauma-informed care and symbolism questionnaire. Findings showed in this sample that the training improved knowledge and attitude in trauma-informed care and staff ability to recognise connections between trauma and psychotic experiences. Originality/value A novel symbolism questionnaire was designed for this evaluation. The findings extend the literature, as they show that staff were more accurate in recognising the specific underlying trauma to the psychosis content following training.