Category Archives: News & conferences

When a child’s death is not accidental

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This week John Devaney gave a CAPRA seminar about best practices in child death reviews. In particular, he talked about deaths (suspected to be) caused by abuse or neglect. According to UNICEF figures, every year 3500 children under the age of fifteen die in industrialized nations as a result of abuse. Surprisingly, more children die from chronic neglect than from physical abuse. And the younger a child, the more he or she is at risk of non-accidental death, with infants having a three times higher risk than those aged 1-4 years, who run twice as much risk as children aged 5-14 years. Another important take home message: when an adult is known to be violent towards one member of the family (e.g., the partner), chances are high that the violence extends to other family members (the children) as well. This means that children are often not ‘only’ witnesses to, but also victims of, domestic violence. Continue reading →

Many paths, one purpose

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Working together to promote wellbeing after trauma: the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health organizes a one-day expert forum to “bring together leading international and Australian experts, each with a unique perspective on tackling the mental health effects of trauma. As well as exploring trauma-related mental heath issues in a global context, expert speakers will share their views on best practice approaches to preventing, assessing and treating different types of trauma.”

Some of the names: Mark Creamer, Beverly Raphael, Jonathan Bisson, Richard Bryant, Derrick Silove, Alexander McFarlane, and David Forbes.

Check out the expert forum blog here.

Go and collaborate

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Child trauma researchers should collaborate more. That was one of the messages of the meta-analysis my colleagues and I recently published. Until now, researchers have conducted a number of interesting studies but these were relatively small and used a wide variety of methods and designs, which doesn’t permit robust conclusions. By combining efforts (see also the ‘data sharing’ page) much more could be known faster.

Our message is still relevant, but there are also some beautiful examples of collaboration. One was presented by Nancy Kassam-Adams at the European Conference on Traumatic Stress Studies. With three colleagues from the US and Australia she is building a large database from datasets of individual researchers: the Child PTSD Prediction Project. The data of  2500 children have been included so far (that’s already 25 times the usual N in a study…). It will enable researchers to answer questions about early risk and protective factors, and about trajectories of posttraumatic stress symptoms in children. Go and collaborate!

“I don’t know” may mean many things

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What do you think a child means when he says “I don’t know”? Especially when you’re talking about a traumatic event, such as the sudden death of his father? During the expert forum on Children and trauma (June 9 in Utrecht), communication specialists Joyce Lamerichs and Marca Schasfoort  zoomed in on interactions between children and professionals talking about traumatic experiences. The main conclusion of their analysis: don’t think too quickly that a child doesn’t know or doesn’t want to answer. Children may have many reasons to say that they don’t know, and sometimes still come up with answers afterwards.

Conference snapshot: update on Japan

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Masaharu Maeda was one of the keynote speakers of the European Conference on Traumatic Stress. He is the president of the Japanese Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and, not surprisingly, heavily involved in helping survivors of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March. Maeda provided some firsthand information about inhabitants’ losses, their reactions to the disaster, and current problems in the shelters.

According to the latest figures, about 15.000 people died and 10.000 people are missing. Because of this large number of missing people and the long and difficult process of retrieving and identifying bodies, many people are still uncertain about the fate of their loved ones. Almost all of them will have died, but there is no confirmation of their death, which makes it difficult to start to mourn; it puts the process of grieving ‘on hold’. Continue reading →