Trauma Survivorship and Disability

This chapter focuses on the central role of disability in how people experience, deal with, and overcome traumatic experiences. Stress can emerge from a variety of health conditions (e.g., congenital disability, adventitious disability, chronic illness) and can be exacerbated significantly when one experiences trauma. Disability and trauma are not mutually exclusive experiences; in fact, they are not infrequently seen in tandem. Although trauma is frequently associated with large-scale natural events (e.g., hurricane, tornado, war), people with disabilities (PWD) experience various degrees of trauma due to pervasive societal discrimination, which can result in a number of psychopathologies necessitating affective type treatments. Despite trauma survivorship being common in nearly all societies around the globe, the evidence base has been thin, but the number of available interventions with promising options has been evolving quickly. The recovery from the effects of both disability and trauma is a process that requires an understanding of the diversity of factors that contribute to the trauma as well as the customization of treatments to individuals’ life situations.