“If you surprise your father in the garage, and he throws you up against the wall, you’ll forgive him,” Brassard says. Neglect is also embedded in every other form of abuse. Psychological abuse includes calling children derogatory names or saying things like “having you ruined my life.” Neglect includes extreme emotional unresponsiveness and other things parents don’t do that would normally promote healthy brain development and social functioning. Philip Saigh has refined understanding of PTSD, finding that children diagnosed with it have greater anxiety and depression and lower verbal IQs than those exposed to trauma who don’t have PTSD also, that the latter closely resemble children never exposed to trauma at all. Understanding Trauma in Children: Philip Saigh It’s like getting back on the horse after being thrown.” “The idea is to expose the child to the feared situation in his or her imagination, under controlled conditions.
“Essentially, I asked kids to imagine aspects of their traumatic experience, gradually and for longer periods,” recalls Saigh of the treatment, now called Exposure Therapy and used in many countries. A similar method had also helped American soldiers returning from Vietnam. Still, Saigh’s pool of children grew, and he began treating them with an adaptation of a technique called flooding, previously used to reduce students’ test-taking anxieties. The condition, often accompanied by - and confused with - depression and anxiety, is diagnosed only when symptoms persist for at least one month. Then in 1980, the American Psychological Association published a new adult diagnosis called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Saigh began constructing an interview to identify PTSD in children. Read student stories or support psychology scholarships at TC > “I spent a lot of time in the library, reviewing similar cases seen after the two World Wars.” “They didn’t fi t existing models of classification,” he recalls. Their symptoms included nightmares, flashbacks, inability to concentrate, and preoccupation with illness and death.
When civil war broke out, he began seeing children who’d survived bombings and terrible injuries and witnessed death. During the 1970s, Saigh taught at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and served as a therapist at AUB Hospital. The term “school psychologist” may convey a focus on the everyday, but that’s been anything but the case with Philip Saigh and Marla Brassard. Rethinking Adversity Part One: How We Cope Many Teachers College psychologists have been at the forefront of both kinds of work - from the front lines of the global refugee crisis to the impact of police violence against minorities, to the nexus of environment and genetics. This effort has focused both on factors inside the individual and external social forces such as inequities in wealth and power, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and class. Since Freud, psychology has sought to understand how adversity harms us and can make us stronger - and to help people cope more effectively. Illustration: Carlo Giambarresi TC psychologists are focusing on both people's internal ability to cope with adversity and external social forces that create adverse circumstances.īeing human entails facing difficulty.