Unit 1 – Case study
Case Study: A Trauma-Informed Response After Self-Injury
This is a role-play demonstration by Dr. Laurie Markoff, a recognised expert in trauma-informed care, showing a clinician’s real-time response to a young client in residential care following an incident of self-injury. It puts the principles from this unit’s Core Reading directly into practice: validating the client’s experience before anything else, exploring triggers with genuine curiosity rather than judgement, and gently assessing readiness for change before introducing any alternative coping strategies.
This is one of the more clinically detailed pieces in this course, and deliberately so — it’s included because seeing a skilled, trauma-informed response modelled in full, rather than described in summary, teaches something a written case study can’t.
A serious content note: this video includes a young person’s detailed, first-person account of self-injury, including her method, her triggers, and how she conceals it from others. This is real, unfiltered clinical material, included for genuine professional training value — not to be read as instructional in any other sense. Please only continue if you’re in a settled place to engage with this level of detail. If you’re not, that’s completely understandable — skip it and come back another time, or not at all.
