Dr. James O'Shea:

Many of our young people who go into prison have had significant traumatic life experiences. As Dr. Lambert pointed to, these life experiences contribute to substance misuse problems and a whole range of social problems as well. The difficulty with trauma and traumatic life experience is that trauma fuels trauma. People have traumatic life experiences, get themselves in bother, go into prison and are involved in various activities where they experience more trauma. We have become very good at responding to addiction and doing so early. I have spent most of my adult life working in or around addiction services. There has been a huge improvement in the quality of our addiction services over that timeframe. We are only early days and our services are only emerging for treating trauma. We need to recognise, as Dr. Lambert said, there is such a high overlap between traumatic life experiences and substance abuse. We need to treat them both early, quickly and efficiently using evidence-based interventions.