We can’t avoid trauma. Most of us will have a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, whether it’s being involved in a car accident, seeing a serious injury occur, surviving sexual assault or living through the horror of losing a home – or worse, loved ones – to natural disaster. Traumatic events vary greatly and so too do our responses to them. No two people deal with trauma in exactly the same way, but contrary to what TV dramas and sensationalist media reports might suggest, most of us do deal with it successfully.

According to trauma expert Professor Mark Creamer, the reality is that “human beings are very resilient and the vast majority of people recover from trauma with the help of family members and friends without developing any significant mental health problems”.

Professor Creamer, who was Director of the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health at the University of Melbourne and a clinical psychologist, has worked extensively with individuals and communities affected by trauma. He told us that while professional help isn’t always necessary for recovery, supportive relationships are vital. This includes relationships in the workplace. In fact work relationships – supportive or otherwise – may play a large role in how successfully someone affected by trauma recovers.

The importance of work relationships is most obvious when a traumatic incident actually occurs in the workplace – and it is not only the injured worker who may experience trauma. People who aren’t directly involved in a traumatic event may still be traumatised by it.

“Generally speaking we’re talking about being exposed to an event that is particularly frightening, and that involves physical threat to the self or to other people. …We often see people who were supervisors on a shift where there was a bad accident, someone got killed or severely injured and they saw it and had to deal with it. So even though they weren’t themselves under threat the event can still be very traumatic.”

Regardless of where and how trauma occurs, Professor Creamer says that employers can play a vital role in “facilitating the normal recovery process.” Acknowledging what a person has gone through, listening to them talk if and when they want to, offering support and assistance where it is needed and being flexible about hours and duties are key ways in which employers can assist people return to work after a difficult experience. Returning to a normal routine as soon as possible helps – and for most people, you don’t get much more normal than work.

However employers and coworkers aren’t mental health professionals and while there is much they can do to support an employee who has experienced trauma, there are also a few things to avoid. Pushing people to talk about what happened to them is a big no no, as is offering simplistic platitudes like “Just pull yourself together,” or “You’ll get over it.” Such platitudes are never helpful and the fact is that a minority of people won’t just “get over” trauma on their own.

Professor Creamer told us that “People can develop a range of mental health conditions following trauma,” including depression, substance use problems and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These conditions may mean that productivity suffers or, in the case of PTSD, that the employee throws themselves into work as a means of avoiding painful memories.

PTSD involves three main groups of symptoms: being haunted by memories of the traumatic event, trying to avoid reminders of it and becoming emotionally numb, and being jumpy, on-edge and on the lookout for danger. In the workplace, PTSD might manifest through the person withdrawing into themselves, being easily startled (for example, when a door slams), or expressing their distress directly through tears or talking.

If an employer feels that an employee may be suffering from depression, substance use problems or PTSD as a result of trauma it may be appropriate to sensitively intervene – but there are no magic solutions.

“Gently expressing their concern, expressing the fact that they recognise that things don’t seem to be going too well, and encouraging the person to perhaps go and have a chat with a GP, or of course if they’ve got a good Employee Assistance Program [EAP] then the EAP would be a good place to go.”  

While society at large has become much more receptive to the idea that trauma may cause ongoing mental health problems, there are still what Professor Creamer describes as “very clear pockets of resistance”. Only about a third of the people who develop PTSD, for example, receive effective treatment. Stigma and “macho culture” prevent many people from seeking the help they need and these same attitudes may be responsible for unhelpful workplace responses to traumatised individuals.

“Being critical, being unsupportive, or belittling the person because they have a mental health problem are big dangers. On the contrary we want to demonstrate support and concern. Making unreasonable or unrealistic demands on them also doesn’t help: assuming that they’re going to be able to function at their full level or at the peak performance of someone in that position when perhaps they can’t. If the accident happened at work, another potential danger is forcing the person back to where it happened, or to a situation that they’re very frightened of, before they’re ready to do so.”

When the employee is ready, well managed return to work will assist with recovery from mental health conditions that may have developed post-trauma. In fact, post-trauma return to work isn’t really a special case. Employers with flexible, accommodating and personable injury management systems are already “trauma-ready.”

We might not like it, but recovering from trauma is something most of us know how to do, because we – in our own way and time – have done it ourselves.

The Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health has developed guidelines for People with ASD and PTSD, and their families and carers. You can download them here.