By Bessel A. van der Kolk
Brookline, Mass. – As a young psychiatrist, I worked with Vietnam War combat veterans and confronted the astonishing lack of resources to help these men and women who had sacrificed so much for their country. Three decades later, that situation has greatly improved. First, we named the problem — post-traumatic stress disorder — and then in 1989 Congress created the National Center for PTSD to help suffering veterans.
Their plight has also led to a greater recognition of the impact of violence on children. For every soldier returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with symptoms of depression or PTSD, there are around 10 children in the United States who are traumatized by exposure to family violence, sexual abuse, neglect and assault, with consequences comparable to those of adult exposure to war-zone violence. We have made progress in treating these children, but that progress is threatened by a drastic budget cut proposed by the White House.
Share This Post!
Why Don’t Child Sex Abuse Victims Tell?
By David M. Allen, M.D. One of the things that child abuse deniers like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation focus on, besides child abuse apologist Elizabeth Loftus's irrelevant arguments about the unreliability of [...]
Post-Traumatic Childhood
By Bessel A. van der Kolk Brookline, Mass. - As a young psychiatrist, I worked with Vietnam War combat veterans and confronted the astonishing lack of resources to help these men and women [...]
About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study
By the Center for Disease Control The CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and later-life health and well-being. The original ACE [...]
How Childhood Abuse Changes the Brain
By Leonard Holmes Studies have demonstrated over and over that childhood abuse and neglect results in permanent changes to the developing human brain. These changes in brain structure appear to be significant [...]
Traumatic Experiences Widespread Among U.S. Youth
By the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Princeton, N.J.—New national data show that at least 38 percent of children in every state have had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience or ACE, such [...]
Childhood Trauma May Shorten Life By 20 Years
By Joseph Brownstein While it may not come as a surprise that survivors of childhood traumas have more difficult lives, a new study says that those children can also expect their [...]