Category Archives: Tips & findings

The role of siblings in children’s mental health

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siblings mental healthWhen you were young(er), did you also engage in personality predictions with your peers based on order in the family? For example, that the oldest of three siblings would be the bossiest and the youngest the most spoiled? Almost everyone (90% of us) have one or more siblings. And we know they play an important role in our lives.

Scientists in the Netherlands have now combined international research examining siblings’ role in children’s mental health. This is an innovative step, since there is quite a lot of research on parenting but not so much on siblings. Moreover, the authors state that the sibling relationship is “one of the most neglected relationships in psychological research and practice.” Also in the child traumatic stress area, I think siblings are still overlooked. Continue reading →

Supporting Children with Cancer: The Cellie Cancer Coping Kit

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Cellie Cancer Coping KitI love it when research gets translated into practice. This guest post by Aimee Hildenbrand, BS & Meghan Marsac, PhD shows a great example. Aimee is a doctoral student at Drexel University and a clinical research assistant at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Meghan is a pediatric psychologist and the center’s Director of Training.

While children with cancer and their families are often resilient, the invasive and painful medical procedures, emotions, and changes to daily life that come with illness can be overwhelming. In fact, children with cancer frequently consider treatment to be more traumatic than cancer itself, underlining the need for comprehensive medical care that incorporates psychosocial services. However, supportive care tools tailored to the experience of childhood cancer and its treatment are limited.

To help address children and caregivers’ need for emotional support during pediatric cancer treatment, our team at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia developed the Cellie Cancer Coping Kit (Cellie Kit). Continue reading →

Can very young children do cognitive-behavioral therapy ?

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CBT for young children“Five key considerations for working with young traumatized children” by Dr. Alex de Young was one of our most popular blogposts last year. We know relatively little of young children’s recovery and of how we can help them. The field is rapidly moving forward however and one of its pioneers, Prof. Michael Scheeringa, has agreed to tell you more about his new CBT approach for very young children. Continue reading →

Imagery rehearsal therapy for post-trauma nightmares

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sleep treatmentMelynda Casement and Leslie Swanson have recently published an interesting meta-analysis on imagery rehearsal therapy. Find the summary below, with thanks to Georgina Johnstone*.

 

Sleep problems are a central component of posttraumatic stress, both in children and adults. Difficulty maintaining sleep is reported by up to 91% of people with PTSD, with 72% experiencing nightmares.

Imagery rehearsal (IR) therapy is more and more used to overcome these sleep problems. Although not all versions of IR employ exactly the same techniques, they all have a cognitive behavioral orientation and include these three elements: Continue reading →

Working in bushfire affected areas: Nurses’ experiences

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bushfireAustralia has been struck by numerous bushfires in the past few weeks and will be seeing many more as the peak of the bushfire season is yet to come. How do professionals experience working in bushfire situations? Samara Wilson* has summarized a recent study for you.

Ranse and Lenson (2012) have looked into the diverse role nurses played in the aftermath of the Australian Black Saturday and Victorian bushfires in 2009. Nursing staff are often among the first to be involved with response and recovery efforts following disasters such as bushfires. However, nurses often feel they lack the necessary training to provide adequate support for the people they encounter in these extreme situations. Education for disaster scenarios is not standardized across Australian settings, with nurses experiencing varied amounts of training, and there is little research in this domain.

This study used in-depth telephone interviews with 11 nurses volunteering with St John’s Ambulance Australia who were involved in the Black Saturday and Victorian bushfires in 2009. The researchers looked at the roles nurses played in psychosocial support, coordination, and problem solving, and examined how these were influenced by the nurses’ prior education, training, and availability of resources.

Two broad themes emerged from the interviews. The first theme was ‘being prepared’: Continue reading →