Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:52:01.198Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to USA to study trauma services for children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Dora Black*
Affiliation:
Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street London NW3 2QG
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

I have spent all my professional life as a child psychiatrist working in hospitals and clinics. For many years I have been interested in helping bereaved children and conducted research on how best to help them. As the result of my interest I found myself being asked to see increasing numbers of children who were traumatically bereaved because of one parent killing the other, an event that the children often witnessed. I needed to familiarise myself with the effects of witnessing or being caught up in severe trauma, as well as the effects of bereavement. As I saw more and more of these traumatically bereaved children, I realised that child psychiatric services were not well organised to help these children who often needed emergency help. I decided, with the backing of the Royal Free Hospital, to retire from my post as head of a busy department and set up a clinic for children who had been acutely psychologically traumatised. This work is now supported by a grant through Cruse-Bereavement Care from the Department of Health. I wanted to see how others had organised services for such children so I applied for and was granted a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to study trauma services for children in the USA. I spent a month visiting San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New Haven and New York in September 1993.

Type
Briefings
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1994

References

Marans, S. & Cohen, D.J. (1993) Children and inner city violence: strategies for intervention. In Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children (eds Leavitt L. & Fox N.). Hove, Sussex: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Pynoos, R.S., Nader, K., Frederick, C., Gonda, L. et al (1987) Grief reactions in school age children following a sniper attack at school. Special issue: Grief and bereavement. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 24, 5363.Google Scholar
Pynoos, R.S., Nader, K., (1992) Grief and trauma in children and adolescents. Bereavement Care, 11, 210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terr, L.C. (1979) Children of Chowchilla. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 34, 547623.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Terr, L.C. (1983) Chowchilla revisited: the effects of psychic trauma four years after a school bus kidnapping. American Journal of Psychiatry, 140, 15431550.Google ScholarPubMed
Van der Kolk, B., (ed.) (1987) The psychological consequences of overwhelming life experiences. In Psychological Trauma. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Google Scholar
Van der Kolk, B., (ed.) (1988) The trauma spectrum: the interaction of biological and social events in the genesis of the trauma response. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 1, 3, 273290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Kolk, B. (ed.) & Saporta, J. (1991) The biological response to psychic trauma: mechanisms and treatment of intrusion and numbing. Anxiety Research, 4, 199212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.