This week we welcomed Veronique to the podcast, who shared with us about trauma and chronic illness.
Veronique majored in cross-cultural studies & premed for a BA at Antioch college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the focus was also on experiential learning. She then found a medical school with a similar emphasis on learning by doing, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, whose mission is “to create life-long learners.” This style of learning has served her greatly in the exploration of her health and looking into factors that may have contributed to, and continue to perpetuate, her fatigue.
She attended the University of New Mexico for her Family Practice Residency, having spent her early years in Santa Fe, as it has a medical student program, and philosophy, like McMaster’s. After completing her medical training, she traveled the country doing short stints as a temp doc (locum tenens). She tested out different environments such as private, independent outpatient practices in Michigan and Rhode-Island, hospital-based clinics in Maine, the Indian Health Service in North Dakota, and an isolated clinic in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
She then settled down as full-time faculty in a small, community-based residency training program that was just getting started, in Concord, New Hampshire, where she delivered babies, taught residents and medical students, bought her first house, and made good friends.
In 1998, she took a year off and realized that she could become more like one of her role models, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, who works with the relationship between mind and body. She went back to school to become a somatic psychotherapist. What she learned helped make sense of her own symptoms. She got a Master’s degree at Naropa University and did specialty training in working with trauma, bonding and attachment.
Her research has taken the form of scouring the medical databases for over twenty years. She has put together new ways of making sense of chronic illness; and finding commonalities between chronic illnesses (chronic fatigue syndrome ME/CFS, MS, diabetes (both type 1 and 2), RA, Inflammatory bowel disease, Lupus, and asthma, among others). She has also been using herself as a case study, examining and working with her symptoms and their relationships to past and present life events, and she shares these throughout her blog to validate just how much is changing in our understanding of disease and tools for healing.
1986 BA Cross Cultural Studies & Pre Med – Antioch College – “learning by doing”
1990 MD – McMaster University Medical School, Ontario, Canada – “how to be lifelong learners”
1993 Family Physician – University of New Mexico in Albuquerque Family Practice Residency
1993-1995 Family Physician Locum Tenens (short term clinical work around the USA)
1995-1998 Assistant Professor – New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Practice Residency Program, teaching; obstetrics and full spectrum care;
2003 MA Somatic Psychology / Body-Based Psychotherapy – Naropa University in Boulder, CO – working with the wisdom & language of the body and symptoms
2000 to present: Nervous System Specialist using Somatic & Trauma Therapies
2001 Training – Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Trauma)
2006+ Training – Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (Trauma)
2006+ Training – Prenatal and Perinatal Professional Training (Early Trauma)
Master’s Thesis: Mead, V. P. (2003). Somatic psychology theory and the origins of chronic illness: a case study of type 1 diabetes. Somatic Psychology. Boulder (CO), Naropa University: 427 p.
Journal Article: Mead, V. P. (2004). “A new model for understanding the role of environmental factors in the origins of chronic illness: a case study of type 1 diabetes mellitus.” Med Hypotheses 63(6): 1035-1046.
Book Chapter: Mead, V. P. (2007). Timing, Bonding, and Trauma: Applications from experience-dependent maturation and traumatic stress provide insights for understanding environmental origins of disease. Advances in Psychology Research. A. M. Columbus, Nova Science Publishers. 49: 1-80. (downloadable from bottom of free ebooks page)
Special links referenced in the podcast included:
ACEs and chronic illness
https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/adverse-childhood-experiences-and-chronic-illness-boyhood/
Her own story and journey with chronic illness from trauma perspectives
https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/how-understanding-trauma-is-making-sense-of-my-chronic-illness-and-helping-me-heal/
A list of somatic trauma therapies she recommends for healing trauma and nervous system perceptions of threat
https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/chronic-illness-recovery-books-on-trauma/
A list of books on trauma and chronic illness and related perspectives
https://chronicillnesstraumastudies.com/therapies-chronic-illness-stress-triggers-perception-threat/
Her blog is HERE.
