Systems-Generated Trauma: When Asking for Help Becomes Harm

Every so often, something arrives that stops you mid-sentence.
Not because it’s surprising, but because it is so familiar that it feels like someone has finally written down the thing you have been living.

That’s what happened when I read Cerebra’s new report on Systems Generated Trauma.

For years, families have quietly tried to explain a particular kind of harm - not the harm caused by disability, but the harm caused by trying to access support for disability. The trauma that doesn’t come from illness, or crisis, or catastrophe, but from public bodies themselves: from the disbelief, the suspicion, the procedural violence, the bureaucratic indifference.

What this report names as Systems-Generated Trauma is, for so many of us, simply called life.

Parents already exhausted by caring responsibilities are pushed into safeguarding processes when they ask for help. Families seeking clarity are met with blame. Children in distress are categorised instead of understood. And parents - already acting as carers, coordinators, translators, advocates, and crisis managers - are treated as risks rather than experts.

None of this is rare.
None of it is accidental.
And once you’ve lived it, you can never unsee it.

What struck me most about this report was not the scale of the harm - I already knew that - but the quiet admission that the harm is institutional. Built into guidance, embedded in culture, maintained through routines that have gone unquestioned for years. Families are traumatised not because something has malfunctioned, but because the system is functioning exactly as designed.

That is the part that lands hardest.

Because so much of the trauma families carry is not from the disability itself, but from what it takes to obtain even the smallest amount of lawful support. The constant burden of proof, the rewriting of reality, the suggestion that a child’s suffering is “behaviour,” the refusal to trust lived experience, the unspoken threat that asking for more help might lead to scrutiny rather than support.

I have worked with families who arrive at my inbox already apologising for the state they are in. Already frightened. Already scanning conversations for signs of disbelief. Already rehearsing every sentence so they won’t be misinterpreted. These aren’t isolated experiences - they are patterns - recognisable, predictable, and deeply corrosive.

And yet, when these families show signs of distress, the system treats it as further evidence against them.

The trauma that professionals call “parental anxiety” is often just the normal response to years of being disbelieved.

The trauma called “conflict” is often the consequence of being ignored.

The trauma described as “unreasonable behaviour” is often the last remaining defence of someone who has run out of places to fall.

What the report describes, families have been living - and what families have been living, professionals have often dismissed.

It shouldn’t take a national charity and a team of academics to validate what parents have been saying for decades - but here we are. And maybe that is what makes this moment important - because naming something has power - naming it turns the hidden into the visible - it removes the impulse to treat each story as an unfortunate exception.

Because none of this is exceptional.

It is systemic.
It is predictable.
And it is avoidable.

The question now is not whether Systems Generated Trauma exists - families have already provided the evidence. The question is what public services choose to do with this truth.

Will they continue to see trauma as the fault of families?
Or finally recognise it as the product of their systems?

Will they continue to train staff in trauma-informed practice while ignoring the trauma created inside their own processes? Or will they look inward and begin dismantling the practices that cause the harm in the first place?

Will they continue to treat parents as problems to be managed?
Or begin treating them as partners?

The answers will tell us everything about where we go from here.

Because families do not need more assessments.
They do not need more suspicion.
They do not need more language of risk applied to their exhaustion.

They need systems that recognise their humanity.
They need processes that don’t retraumatise.
They need public bodies that are willing not just to apologise after harm is done, but to design systems that avoid the harm entirely.

Most of all, they need to be believed the first time.

This report gives the sector its warning.

The only question now is whether public services will finally listen.