Our second guest on the Scholarly Panel is Pat Miersma, who will be sharing with us a clinical, therapeutic perspective on language and literature in trauma healing.
Pat Miersma, RN, BScN, MN is a Mental Health Nurse-Ethnic Clinical Specialist. She currently serves as the Global Trauma Healing Consultant for SIL International, a nonprofit organization serving language communities worldwide in language development since 1934 (www.sil.org). Her work specializes in community and cross-cultural issues related to trauma healing and post-traumatic stress disorder. She previously served as the SIL International Counseling Coordinator.
Pat and her husband, a Marriage and Family Therapist, have served with SIL since 1980. They have lived and worked in Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea and Africa, where they helped establish Tumaini Counseling Center in Nairobi, Kenya in 1989.
Pat serves on the Advisory Council of the Trauma Healing Institute (www.thi.americanbible.org) and is one of the authors of Healing the Wounds of Trauma: How the church can help, developed in 2003, and now being used in 100 countries and published in or being translated into 194 languages.
She holds a MN from UCLA and was assistant professor of psychiatric and community mental health nursing at Biola University from 1992–1996. Pat was an officer in the US Army Nurse Corps at 27th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H. unit) in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, from April 1970-June 1971.