Child abuse and the dynamics of silence

In constructively responding to our Viewpoint paper on institutional abuse and societal silence, Haliburn (2014) articulates several core challenges for psychiatry. These are that the mental health consequences of early trauma are too compelling to ignore, that societal silence has a strong tendency to be pervasive, and that we thus have to avoid passively opting for silence if we are to be part of the solution rather than an extension of the problem.