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{
    "id": 962314,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/962314/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 541,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Kasanga",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13185,
        "legal_name": "Sylvia Mueni Kasanga",
        "slug": "sylvia-mueni-kasanga"
    },
    "content": "Trauma is a serious thing, and we live in a society where we do not understand the effects of trauma. I am not an expert, but the research that I did when I was working on the Bill helped me to learn that trauma is the source of a lot of our societal problems; yet it is something that can be easily treated and managed. Some of the effects of living with trauma include gender based violence, use and abuse of drugs, alcoholism, depression, disorders that come with post-traumatic stress; strange addictions, such as addiction to pornography, sex, insomnia and others that I cannot mention here. Essentially, Madam Temporary Speaker, our men and women in uniform cannot live a full life on a daily basis. In fact, their experiences reduce their life expectancy. This is the scenario that our disciplined forces face, and the question is what kind of impact does their experience have on their families? The effect of such experiences on one person are easily transmitted to the immediate family and to the larger family. Mental illness has a way of affecting the larger family because of the stigma that is around it. When we were debating the Mental Health (Amendment) Bill, 2018, we spoke a lot about fighting stigma, because it is the first way of dealing with mental illnesses. Can you imagine what the immediate families of our disciplined forces go through when a member has come home with trauma, is dealing with its effects, and has received absolutely no support? It creates a vicious cycle. The children are affected, because they grow up with a parent who has effects of trauma, which he projects onto them. The children have their own trauma that is created from growing up with a traumatised parent, and then it becomes a vicious cycle. We can then see how broken families begin to happen in such scenarios, yet we are talking about something that can be managed through psychosocial support, counselling and medication in extreme cases. It is possible to deal with these things."
}