Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies - Tapa dura

""Creating Sanctuary will be useful to those needing an introduction to the field and their teachers, to those who are more experienced and to those who wish to reflect on the detail and process of the professional role in mental health, whatever the age of their clientele." "This beautifully written book...shows how the way to recovery consists of the creation of therapeutic environments in which people can regain a voice and acknowledge the reality of their past so they do not have to repeat the trauma, but instead create new ways of being members of a larger community." -Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., Boston University School of Medicine "A "must" book for all interested in improving life, especially mental health workers.." -"Choice "To save our families, nothing is more important than ending the spiral of violence. Here at last is a psychiatrist and activist whose programs can help adults to uproot the original trauma, and stop repeating the violencethat was done to them. "Creaing Sanctuary shows us how to save future children from abuse, empty our over-crowded jails, and rescue this nation from leaders who see violence as normal.." -Gloria Steinem

Creating Sanctuary makes some broadly challenging statements about human nature and social organization. Dr. Sandra Bloom interweaves the individual and the social, the personal and the political, with the story of how she and a group of friends and colleagues created a traditional psychiatric milieu based on social psychiatry principles. Bloom and her colleagues have come to believe that unresolved, multi-generational, often forgotten trauma leads to a compulsion to repeat that is a powerful force in individual and social history. Because of this unresolved legacy of trauma, all of our social systems are "trauma-organized," producing institutions which are unresponsive to and often directly counter to human needs.

Creating Sanctuary presents the thesis that effective social reconstruction is only effective if we understand the biological, psychological, social, and moral legacy of trauma.