By Amy Morin, LCSW
Although adults often say things like, “He was so young when that happened. He won’t even remember it as an adult,” childhood trauma can have a lifelong effect. And while kids are resilient, they’re not made of stone.
That’s not to say your child will be emotionally scarred for life […]
By Jeanne Supin The “fight or flight” instinct has served the human species well, helping us respond quickly to threats, but according to child and adolescent psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry it can also change our brains for the worse. If the threats we encounter are extreme, persistent, or frequent, we become too […]
By Maria Popova “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James asserted in his revolutionary 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. Two generations later, Rilke wrote in a beautiful letter of advice to a young woman: “I am not one of those who neglect the body in order […]
By Benjamin E. Saunders, PhD and Zachary W. Adams, PhD
The epidemiology of traumatic experiences in childhood is a key context for research, clinical treatment, program management, and policy development. This article discusses the conceptual, methodological, and programmatic challenges in precisely answering even relatively simple questions concerning the basic prevalence and incidence of […]
By Lawrence Robinson, Melinda Smith, M.A., and Jeanne Segal, Ph.D.
If you’ve experienced an extremely stressful or disturbing event that’s left you feeling helpless and emotionally out of control, you may have been traumatized. Psychological trauma can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also […]
By Maria Cohut It is not news that people abused as children are more exposed to clinical depression, anxiety, and a higher risk of death from suicide. But now, researchers have begun to reveal what happens in the brain following this kind of trauma.
According to data provided by the Children’s Bureau of the […]
By the Concepción de León I hear some people have trouble with therapy, that it can take years for them to open up to their doctors, let alone cry or break down. Not me. Day one, I told my therapist, Amy Bernstein, “I’ll just tell you everything, and we’ll go from there.”
I was […]
By Maureen V. Kilrain, MS, PA-C Child neglect and abuse are perhaps the most significant community health challenge in the United States. Mental health experts in trauma continue to investigate and apply a condition known as developmental trauma disorder (DTD), which is characterized by permanent changes in the neurobiologic system of children and […]
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 memory (more on that at the end of the post), is the fact that many adults who claim to have […]
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 […]
