Children and PTSD

Slowly, but much much faster then over the previous four decades, the country has woken up to PTS in the civilian society especially in abused and traumatized children!!

Children's hospital screening for PTSD

July 6, 2010 Badly injured kids who have disorder are being offered treatment, free of charge.

Dell Children's Medical Center in Austin is now screening the most severely injured children those who come through the hospital's trauma center for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Children between the ages of 7 and 17 who show signs of mental or emotional stress because of an accident, wreck or medical mishap also are being offered free counseling, the researchers said. The screening and the counseling, both of which require parent and child permission, are part of a study aimed at predicting which children are likely to suffer PTSD, an ailment more often associated with troops traumatized in battle.

The researchers started enrolling children in November, and as of Friday, 111 had agreed to participate. They hope to enroll 250 participants.

"Once we have a \u2026 reliable way of predicting (PTSD), then we can provide a reliable intervention to see if they can be prevented from having PTSD," said Kevin Stark, a professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas and director of psychological services at the Texas Child Study Center, a collaboration between Dell Children's and UT. "The reason that is important is because PTSD, once it develops, becomes a chronic, lifelong disorder." Continued

If this is a really serious study as well as attempt at care, and not just some exercise to be abandoned as taking to much time or costing to much money, they will find that more then just accidents etc. can and does bring about PTS from trauma a child or adult experiences or lives through or in, and long overdue!

This should be expanded, and has already started but not as a wide well reported issue in occupation theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan, child soldiers in other parts of the world, and not treating enough children. This study could learn much from the work already going on but in a tiny fraction of the affected in the rest of the world! Why, because destructive invasions and occupations bring on the most extreme life traumas for much more then the soldiers sent and how the affected handle those extremes for the complete change of a normal life brought up to expect to live!