Psychiatrists address trauma of human trafficking survivors – Healio

Psychiatrists play an important role in addressing human trafficking, according to a group of California-based clinicians.

“Human trafficking is increasingly being viewed through a public health lens, which allows us to address it as an issue that affects health,” Rachel Robitz, MD, director of the family medicine/psychiatry residency program at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, and colleagues wrote in Psychiatric Services. “With this approach, psychiatrists can focus on preventive measures and on the health care needs of individuals who have experienced trafficking.”

During residency at the University of California, San Diego, Robitz worked with community partners to begin seeing sex trafficking survivors through residential and outpatient programs in the area. She did this through a self-designed elective rotation and then through formal community psychiatry rotations, according to the report.

More than 100 female sex trafficking survivors at a residential treatment program received their primary care from family medicine residents trained by Robitz, and their psychiatric care from psychiatry residents. Robitz and co-author Priti Ojha, MD, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSD in La Jolla, California, connected with program staff regularly “to ensure a unified treatment plan,” according to the report.

The residential treatment program included group and individual therapies for trauma, as well as educational, life skills and arts-related programs for survivors, who typically continued with the program for 6 to 12 months.

For children who experienced or were at risk for sex trafficking, Ojha worked with program staff, case managers and therapists to help in their trauma treatment.

Ojha co-chairs a multidisciplinary committee at UCSD that works to create and employ an informed protocol for screening for human trafficking, which includes guidance on how to screen and respond in cases of human trafficking and how and when to contact law enforcement or child protective services. Each year, the committee hosts an event for health system staff to raise awareness of human trafficking. Currently, education tools on human trafficking and care are in development.

Robitz and colleagues wrote that providing psychiatric care to human trafficking survivors presented challenges such as a lack of a centralized forum for exchanging medical information and a lack of knowledge among psychiatrists about human trafficking.

“Because this is a relatively novel area of medicine, there is ample room for expansion,” Robitz and colleagues wrote. “We continue to develop educational tools and evaluate and expand our protocol. This early work has focused on sex trafficking. However, we must also consider the needs of labor trafficking survivors, who are rarely offered treatment and have frequently experienced trauma.”