Trauma models emphasise that traumatic experiences are more common and more significant in terms of aetiology than has often been thought in people diagnosed with mental disorders.
Such models have their roots in some psychoanalytic approaches, notably Sigmund Freud's early ideas on childhood sexual abuse and hysteria,[3] Pierre Janet's work on dissociation, and John Bowlby's attachment theory.
[8] From the 1940s to the 1970s, prominent mental health professionals associated with neo-Freudian and psychodynamic psychology proposed trauma models as a means of understanding schizophrenia, including Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Theodore Lidz, Gregory Bateson, Silvano Arieti and R.D.
[9] Some of the psychogenic models proposed by the non-biologic psychologists, such as that of the "schizophrenogenic mother", came under sustained criticism from feminists who saw them as 'mother-blaming' and from a psychiatric profession that increasingly moved towards biological determinism.
[10] From the 1960s, pharmacological treatments became the increasing focus of psychiatry, and by the 1980s, the theory that family dynamics could be implicated in the aetiology of schizophrenia became viewed as unacceptable by many mental health professionals in America and Europe.
[11] Before his death in 2001, Theodore Lidz, one of the main proponents of the "schizophrenogenic" parents theory, expressed regret that current research in biological psychiatry was "barking up the wrong tree".
Recovery entails three phases that are best worked through sequentially: first, "establishing safety"; second, a process of remembrance and mourning for what was lost; and third, "reconnecting with community and, more broadly, society".
[17] In response to Piper's assertion, it has been noted that Arieti stated in Interpretation of Schizophrenia that trauma is more significant when committed by people to whom young human beings are emotionally bonded, and abuse is often interwoven with other forms of neglect and confusing behaviours from caregivers: First of all we have to repeat here what we already mentioned..., that conditions of obvious external danger, as in the case of wars, disasters, or other adversities that affect the collectivity, do not produce the type of anxiety that hurts the inner self and do not themselves favor schizophrenia.
[2] An analysis of the American National Comorbidity Study revealed that people who have endured three kinds of abuse (e.g., sexual, physical, bullying) are at an 18-fold higher risk of psychosis, whereas those experiencing five types are 193 times more likely to become psychotic.
[8] In the field of criminology, Lonnie Athens developed a theory of how a process of brutalization by parents or peers that usually occurs in childhood results in violent crimes in adulthood.