Waimea Weekly
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Wednesday 20 June 2018
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Gladstone Rd and Poutama St Gladstone Road
The cost of trauma spirals up With the recent resignations of some of our best local, front line police officers and the huge cost of paying them out, we are asking the question “is enough being done to manage the obvious truama these people are exposed to”? Local psychiatric nurse Les Watt is a Nelson-based mental health specialist of over 35 years experience and a family therapist who says the most important task we have as individual human beings is to look after our brain, as we need it well-functioning to figure out our next move in a constantly changing world. “An insidious danger to good brain health is trauma and how we manage its effects. We can generally manage quite a bit of stress for some time, but there is a limit,” says Les. Experiencing trauma for around 18 months can be about the maximum a normal brain can cope with, Les says, as after this period people can become seriously and chronically incapacitated and
take years to recover. The New Zealand baby boomer’s generation will remember how many were raised by detached and distant dads who had returned from war seriously traumatised after five solid years of fighting in World War II. Shorter tours of duty are now the norm, largely because of the number of returned servicemen and women who were seriously incapacitated despite not being physically wounded. “I believe trauma probably affects more kiwis than any other mental health condition, yet is largely ignored by most health professionals. The police are in the firing line with regard to managing serious incidents involving tragedy.” With most people reluctant or unable to see how trauma is reshaping their responses and personality until there is a critical incident that stops everyone in their tracks, Les says the difficulty is that trauma is insidious.
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poutama stre
et
Foxes fly at football
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SEE moRE on PAGE 13 Kees Town gets comfortable on the digger that a lucky person will walk away with from this Sunday’s Brightwater School Gala and Silent Auction. The annual event is the school’s single-biggest fund-raiser and community event. Running from 11am-2pm, the gala has everything from entertainment and food, to raffles and pony rides, with all funds raised going towards resurfacing their courts with a hard-wearing synthetic surface. Photo: Emily Beaumont.
SEE PAGE 2
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