SHARON, Pa. – Penn State Shenango will host its annual Stamp Out Stigma event at 12:15 p.m. March 5.
The program, which is free for all community members to attend, will be held in the Shenango campus’ Forker Lab Forum. This year’s event will focus on occupational trauma.
Michelle Kahl, a clinical trauma specialist and the founder of Life Walk Counseling Services, will give the keynote address. She is an EMDRIA-certified therapist and an approved EMDR consultant who trains clinicians in EMDR therapy and co-facilitates training on other topics related to trauma treatment.
The discussion will focus on traumas that are commonly experienced by professional front-line workers such as nurses, EMTs and law enforcement, as well as the vicarious traumas that can occur for individuals in other helping professions, such as those who provide various kinds of therapy and social services.
“Many folks in helping professions are walking wounded and may not realize it,” said Tony Paglia, mental health counselor at Penn State Shenango. “This can contribute to burnout in professions that are essential to the health and well-being of our communities.”
The goals of the program are to define occupational trauma; to bring awareness to the fact that occupational trauma frequently occurs in some of these professions and workplace environments; to teach about some of the warning signs that someone may have experienced trauma through their work; to encourage help-seeking behaviors for individuals so they might heal from work-related traumas and become healthier in both their professional and personal lives; and to acknowledge some of the barriers that sometimes keep individuals from seeking needed help.
“We are offering this program to benefit our Penn State Shenango students as well as area professionals so that folks can more readily begin to recognize when they might be experiencing symptoms of trauma, to normalize these occurrences and to get the word out that effective treatments are available,” Paglia said.
For more information about the event, contact Paglia at atp11@psu.edu or 724 983 2841.