Dredging up past traumas: Harmful or helpful?

Describing traumatic experiences is a routine feature of mental health assessment and treatment it is accepted that in the clinical context this will be distressing to some patients. Research on the experience and sequelae of trauma is also a situation where people may be asked for detailed accounts of traumatic experiences. A common concem voiced by ethics committees is whether the process of reviving memories of past traumas may adversely affect the research participant. The study to be described here attempts to shed some light on this issue. At the conclusion of intensive interviews with 257 mothers and 160 fathers who had a stillborn baby some years earlier, parents were asked about the extent to which they found the interview distressing and the extent to which they found it helpful or unhelpful. We found that of the small proportion of parents who found the interview distressing, nearly all reported that it had also been helpful to them. These data suggest that in evaluating research which involves the evocation of painful memories, ethics committees should not focus on whether participants will become distressed by the research, but rather on whether the study is designed in such a way that the final outcome will be a positive one for participants.