Tag Archives: trauma recovery

Making our daily research practice more inclusive

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Making our daily research lives more inclusive

For the researchers among us, the quality of our findings and resulting policy/practice change depends on how well we work together with the populations we study.

Underrepresented groups are exactly that: underrepresented. Not only in research samples but also in those who lead the research, or are invited on the team.

Next week, we’re organizing two 1-hour conversations on Zoom (offered twice to accommodate time zones) on generating feasible ideas to make our daily research practice more inclusive.

Our starting point is this recent commentary on equity and inclusion in trauma treatment guidelines (several commentary authors will join). We anticipate the conversation to be relevant beyond the trauma research field, and colleagues across disciplines are welcome.

We will discuss how we can be more inclusive in, for example: a) how we construct our research teams, b) what we study, c) how & where we communicate findings, and d) how we give credit (and who we cite!)

We will gravitate towards tangible actions that are feasible for PhD students and early-career researchers.

Our two sessions are (check the links for time zone conversion):

And you can register here to join us – I hope to see you there!

Artist Luka Lesson and colleagues on (lack of) inclusion:

https://youtu.be/D-HED2UXwbw

Homicide of children with a disability

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Children with a disability are at greater risk of death at the hands of someone else – through homicide or the effects of maltreatment – than children without a disability.

John Frederick* has led a systematic review looking at the theories that explain why this is the case. Here is John:  

There is growing recognition of the increased vulnerability to abuse of children who are disabled. Specifically, within the literature on homicides and maltreatment-related deaths of children, disabled children have been identified as likely to experience a greater risk.

We systematically reviewed the empirical literature to better understand the risk factors involved and assess support for the theories that have been proposed to explain this greater risk.

To start with the latter, what are the theories to explain disabled children’s higher risk? They respectively focus on:

  1. The stress of caregiving;
  2. Altruistic intent;
  3. Lack of bonding with the child;
  4. The challenging behaviours of the child;
  5. Cultural beliefs about disabled children; and
  6. Evolutionary imperatives.
Continue reading →

From Trauma to Recovery – A blog post on the 35th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) in Boston

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Curious to know what the recent ISTSS conference was all about? Many thanks to Yoki Mertens for this reflection on the meeting! 

It is early morning in a freezing-cold Boston and Judith Herman presents as the first keynote speaker of the 35th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). One might assume the organizers scheduled it this way to ensure everybody arrives on time and it worked: The room is filled with over 1,700 attendees, more than ever before. It’s been 27 years since Judith Herman published her renowned book “Trauma and Recovery” and introduced the concept of complex PTSD. Back then, the New York Times called it “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud”.

The prevailing question of this annual meeting is: How far has trauma research, trauma therapy, and policies come in helping individuals with (complex) PTSD recover in the past decades? And which paths to take to move forward? After three days of attending symposia, panels, and poster sessions, it can be convincingly stated that steep progress has been made. Meanwhile, some challenges are left to be solved for the current generation of trauma researchers and clinicians. Continue reading →

Highlights of the European Conference on Traumatic Stress 2019

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Didn’t get the chance (like me 😦 ) to attend the conference of the European Society of Traumatic Stress Studies this year?  

Maya Meentken and Marie-Louise Kullberg help us out!

We are Maya and Marie-Louise, two Dutch PhD Candidates, sharing some of our ESTSS conference 2019 – both scientific and non-scientific – highlights with you. It all started on Thursday with the inspiring pre-conference paper-in-a-day workshop: A collaboration of 7 young researchers from Germany, Israel and the Netherlands with an interest in (child) trauma, but with a widely varying focus: From burn injury-related trauma to childhood maltreatment, and an MRI study on dissociation to EMDR for medical-related PTSD.

During this year’s paper-in-a-day, hosted by Anne Krause and Lonneke Lenferink, we focused on child trauma utilizing the data from the Prospective studies of Acute Child Trauma and Recovery (PACT/R) archive. The archive includes data of 32 child trauma studies from e.g. US, UK, Australia, Switzerland, representing data from 5500+ children exposed to a single incident trauma, such as injury, disaster, interpersonal violence etc. and is openly available (!). Throughout the whole day Nancy Kassam-Adams from the PACT/R team joint us to answer all our questions and share her ideas on the rich dataset.

Just a sneak preview of our findings; with a latent class analysis we distinguished three groups based on presence of acute stress disorder symptoms and predicted group membership by several trauma and background characteristics. Discussing the methods and our findings plenary and in subgroups answered many of our questions and generated new ideas. The final paper can be expected soon! To all (early-stage career) researchers: We would highly recommend to participate in a next edition to encourage cross-border collaborations and sharing knowledge. (Eva: yay 🙂 )

On Friday the conference was officially opened with a wonderful performance of the four dancers of Amenti Collective. The next three days, many fantastic keynotes, masterclasses, symposiums, posters and talks followed. Just to mention some of our favorites: Talya Greene’s masterclass on network modeling of PTSD symptoms, the keynote of Mark Jordans on global trauma care and the sharp symposium on early screening for PTSD following emergency department admission by Mirjam van Zuiden, Juanita Haagsma, Katharina Schultebraucks and Miranda Olff.

During the ESTSS Young Minds lunch on Saturday we did some speed-dating with other early-stage career researchers from the psychotrauma field. During the ‘speed dates’ we discussed various topics such as ‘life as a PhD student’, supervision, development etc.,  a nice way to meet some peers!

A last impressive program part we would like to mention is the screening of the documentary Reconstructing Utøya by Steffen Svedsen on Sunday. Next to all high-quality clinical and research presentations, the documentary added the compelling perspective of 4 victims from the horrific 2011-event. It gave interesting insights into the different personal perceptions of the event and the long course of recovery afterwards. It made us realize how vulnerable people are, but also how resilient they  can be, which underlines the relevance of all the research we absorbed the past three days.

Thank you to all the presenters and organizers, we’d hope to see you during a next ISTSS/ESTSS conference!

Thanks Maya and Marie-Louise, and everyone who made the ESTSS conference possible this year! The next ESTSS conference will be in Belfast (16-19 June 2021). The theme: Trauma and resilience through the ages: A life course perspective. 

Maya and Marie-Louise’s blogpost also appeared on the website of the NtVP

They’ll Never Be the Same

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There is a new book about children and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), specifically written for parents. The author, the psychiatrist Michael Scheeringa, has an incredible amount of experience in treatment and research with children and young people in the USA.

I got to read a copy of “They’ll Never Be the Same: A Parent’s Guide to PTSD in Youth” provided by the publisher.

While it may not be what one would call a ‘modest’ book, it’s certainly informative. Scheeringa gives parents a helpful overview of what is known about traumatic stress among children in America, how to go about finding and choosing a therapist and what to expect from therapy. Many parents reading it will feel that Scheeringa is on their side. For clinicians and researchers it may be different, but then again they are not the intended audience.

Scheeringa shares multiple interesting insights. One that struck me was about barriers to mental health care. Only a small percentage of children who experience traumatic stress start and complete mental health treatment. What are the barriers for them and their parents? Several factors may be at play:

  • Stigma – seeking treatment is like admitting failure
  • Stoicism / Altruism – thinking that other people are more deserving of limited treatment resources
  • Privacy – talking about trauma seems more painful than having PTSD symptoms
  • Marshmallow children – adults expecting they will bounce back naturally without treatment
  • No clear ‘front door’ to care – it’s hard to find treatment even if you want to

The author’s view is that these factors can’t be the full explanation. He suspects people don’t want mental health care. Mental health is not a sufficiently attractive goal:

“Stigma, stoicism, privacy, marshmallow children, and problems of access with the lack of a ‘front door’ are all good guesses, but they do not quite add up in my mind. All of those guesses seem to have an underlying assumption that people want mental health. Through many of my interactions with patients and potential patients, over the years, I have wondered if that assumption is just plain wrong. What if people are not that interested in mental health?”

“If people truly are not too interested in better mental health, then it will never matter how much we reduce stigma or make access easier. There may be a fundamental issue that the process of asking for help is worse than the problem of living with psychiatric problems. …. (It) seems that many, if not most, trauma victims just don’t want the services bad enough to put up with our business model, or they just don’t want the services at all. Maybe we are trying to engage people the wrong way.”

Is he correct? What do you think?