Monthly Archives: August 2012

The consequences of fatal domestic violence for children

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A man kills his wife in a moment of rage and flees the house while the children are still with their mother. A mother stabs her husband to death after years of domestic violence. These stories are barely imaginable but too often they happen in reality.

In the Netherlands, estimations are that 40 people are killed by their (ex) partners every year. Many of them leave children behind. In the United States, about 2000 to 3000 children are thought to be affected yearly

In order to get a better understanding of children’s situation after fatal violence, our team at the Dutch National Psychotrauma Center for Children and Youth studied the cases of 38 children (from 25 families) of whom one biological parent killed the other biological parent. We set out to answer four exploratory questions:

1) What did the children experience? Continue reading →

Child in the shadowlands

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The topic of this blogpost made the headlines in a shocking way this week when US Republican Todd Akin stated that women rarely get pregnant from rape because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Akin’s medieval assertions coincided with the publication of an essay in the Lancet that went in the very opposite direction and requested more attention for children born of rape, in particular in war circumstances.

Lead author Elisa van Ee, clinical psychologist and PhD candidate at Centre ’45 introduces the essay below.

The World Health Organization described children born of rape as at risk of being neglected, stigmatized, ostracized, or abandoned. Cases of infanticide (the killing of an infant) have also been reported. Despite such general concerns, little is known about the fate of these children. Continue reading →

Trauma Recovery Fellowships

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Two Melbourne-based fellowships are available for international PhD students and Post docs from January to March 2013!

Please spread the word…

 

The Trauma Recovery Lab

The new Trauma Recovery Lab within Monash Injury Research Institute aims to understand and facilitate children’s recovery from traumatic stress. Continue reading →

8 Guiding Principles for Peer Support Programs in High-Risk Organizations

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This guest post is by Dr. Tracey Varker. Tracey is a research fellow at the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health and specializes in mental health of emergency services personnel, among others.

Peer support programs have emerged as standard practice for supporting staff in many high-risk organizations – that is organizations which routinely expose their personnel to potentially traumatic events such as emergency services, rail services, and the military¹. Despite their increasing popularity and implementation across a range of high-risk organizations, the published literature mostly comprises descriptive studies, often with small samples and cross-sectional designs, or longitudinal designs without comparison groups². Continue reading →

Does self-help treatment for anxiety disorders work?

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This blogpost has recently appeared on the Mental Elf blog. I thought it may interest you as it focuses on self-management for anxiety disorders, including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Many people struggle with anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, social phobia, and PTSD. Moreover, about 30% of us have an anxiety disorder at some point in our life (Kessler et al 2005) but most people never receive treatment.

Self-help interventions may provide a solution when people are unable or unwilling to participate in face-to-face treatment: waiting lists don’t have to be an issue, there is no need to travel to appointments, and costs can be low.

But do these interventions work? And if so, how well do they work compared to face-to-face treatment? Continue reading →