Five minutes with… Rosie Stone

How did you come to work in mental health services?

I've known that I wanted to do a healthcare role for my whole life, and flitted between nursing and midwifery, but eventually landed in psychology because I wanted to be a mental health champion. I have experienced quite a lot of trauma and I started to look into that, and different types of developmental trauma. I found it really fascinating.

I decided to do my undergraduate degree in psychology and did my dissertation on securely attached individuals, looking at why they are so resilient compared with insecurely attached people. Through that work I got involved with MESARCH (the Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Sexual Assault Referral Centres for Better Health) as a research assistant. When I left university I was asked to continue on in MESARCH's lived experience team.

It's an amazing team and the whole project is very much led by the lived experience group and making sure that everything they do is trauma informed. That really inspired me to keep going with lived experience work. I saw what it did for other people, and they saw how helpful it was to the project and the research.

Could you tell me about the experience of helping to develop the course?

In the first meeting of the working group that developed the CPD I was very scared. Everyone did these very grandiose introductions – 'I've worked with refugees, and I worked on the Manchester terrorist attack' – and I thought, 'oh my gosh these people are my icons'. But all of the professionals were extremely welcoming. I'm still a baby in my career but they really emphasised how the lived experience element was valuable and how I could help each of them in what they were doing in the working group, and give a little bit of a backup support to make sure that everything was actually trauma informed. It really was a genuinely lovely experience.

What do you think of the course now it's been launched?

It's wonderful, something that's much needed and could be accessed by more professionals than we ever imagined. Initially we thought it would be great for PWPs and maybe doctors and nurses, but really it has created a crash course in the whole of what trauma is, how we can deal with it, how we can approach it, and how to make sure that people feel heard and listened to. It could be used for all sorts of people – the police, teachers, the general public. I think it's something that is really needed in every service at the moment, as much as people try to be trauma informed on their own.

Would you say your own experiences with mental health services were trauma informed or not?

It very much depended on the service. I started using mental health services when I was 12 and from the age of 12 to 16 I'd say the services were the worst. Things have progressed and I think people are a lot more aware of trauma. I also think that people didn't really consider the role of trauma in children's and teenagers' lives. Some of the questions they'd ask were a bit off, or they'd insist that you go to a CAMHS group even though I specifically requested not to be in a group. It was mainly due to a lack of funding and training, and it wasn't what I would call trauma informed. I've definitely seen a significant improvement.

How could those services have been more trauma informed?

It's about awareness. It almost sounds silly now but they'd seem shocked that I'd been through something at that age, or they'd step around it. You don't need that when you really need to talk to someone or get it out. It's about having that awareness of who you're talking to and what level of openness they are happy with, and gauging whether this is something that they need to talk about. Essentially I went through years and years of work for depression and anxiety, and it wasn't until I formed my own ideas of what PTSD looks like that I realised I'd been treating symptoms of PTSD my whole life and not getting anywhere. There were all these interlinking things… if the right person had made that connection, then I would have had more specialist treatment for 10 years.

Would you like to see more projects which include people with lived experience?

I would love for readers of The Psychologist to know that using lived experience groups is really, really helpful. It should absolutely not be something to be afraid of. People with lived experience will tell you if they think that something's wrong, and they will also tell you if it's too much for them. It's such a brilliant asset to CPD, research, basically everything that psychologists do. Having someone with lived experience can change your work into something that's actually going to make a difference. Having that personal link to someone who's been through that really does change the course of what you're doing. And I don't think that's something we should shy away from… which I know has been a big discussion with people with trauma. I definitely want to encourage anyone who reads this to reach out to lived experienced individuals and involve them in any way they can.

Find out about the course, Trauma-informed practice to support people who have experienced psychological trauma, and book your place.