Psychosocial Trauma in Chili

Today I’m going to talk about Psychosocial Trauma in Chili.

In our country for nearly 17 years human rights were violated by military regimen of Augusto Pinochet. Those violations marked forever the history of our country.

Many people during the military regime were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared and dead. Today their families suffer the consequences of these atrocities. They are a traumatized population. From psychology, can say that this population suffers a” psychosocial trauma”.

Trauma is a term that used to refer to injuries that leave an effect relatively permanent, a wound that leaves a mark. En psychology it used to refer to experiences that mark a person, leave a residue permanent that is not good for her/his.
Psychosocial trauma is a term proposed by Ignacio Martin Baró and refers to a historical process that may have left an entire population affected, the traumatized, in the sense that social relations are disrupted, which is expressed in psychosocial processes that tend to the establishment of distrust, rigidity, skepticism and violence as a means of conflict resolution.

This is the case of many Chileans who suffered violence political from the State.

There are two aspects important in psychosocial trauma: first, the injury that affects every person has been produced in whole or socially, so their roots are not in a single individual but in their society, and second, that their livelihood is found in relationship between individual and society through various institutional mediation, group and even individual.
Ignacio Martin Baró proposes three axes from which you can learn symptoms or causes of psychosocial trauma in a society: violence, social polarization and institutional lie. These three axes you can found it in our society and contribute to prolonging psychological trauma.
If you want to know more about psychological trauma I invite you to attend classes on Friday morning. Greetings!