Tips for parents

Tips for parents on Halloween safety:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-l-pulido-phd/protecting-kids-first-a-s_b_991354.html

Child Abuse and Drug Addiction: an important link

Child abuse is known to be a risk factor for a number of different mental-health problems and antisocial behaviour. For example, the Center's for Disease Control's famous Adverse Childhood Experiences research found a strong link between various adverse experiences in childhood and later physical, social, and mental health problems.

Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York studied 143 people in an attempt to find out more about the link between child abuse and drug addiction. 48 of them were child molesters, 25 were recovering opiate addicts and the rest formed a healthy control group. The participants were asked whether they had suffered adult sexual advances while they were children or if they had had sexual intercourse with someone at least five years older before they were 13. The participants who were child molesters or recovering opium addicts had lost their virginity at a younger age than the healthy controls. However, while the child molesters were more likely to have been abused themselves the recovering addicts were no more likely to have suffered child abuse than the control group. But, this was a relatively small study and a number of other researchers have found a link between child abuse and drug addiction.

Cohen, Lisa J. ... [et al] - Comparison of Childhood Sexual Histories in Subjects with Pedophilia or Opiate Addiction and Healthy Controls: Is Childhood Sexual Abuse a Risk Factor for Addictions? Journal of Psychiatric Practice 16(6):394-404, November 2010

Center for Family Development

Suicide and Child Abuse: a link

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide but what causes it is still not well understood. Mental-health problems are an important risk factor but most people with a mental-health problem do not think about killing themselves. There is strong evidence that people's experiences contribute more towards their mental-health problems than their genes and that bad experiences in people's childhood are linked to more thoughts about, or attempts at, killing oneself in later life. However, there has been less research into this than into genetic factors or mental-health problems. A team of researchers led by Ronny Bruffaerts from Gasthuisberg University Hospital in Belgium studied an international sample of 55,299 people asking them about their experiences in childhood and whether they had thought about, or tried to kill themselves. They found that bad experiences in childhood were associated with an increased risk of suicide attempts and thoughts of suicide. Sexual and physical abuse, especially during adolescence, were consistently the strongest risk factors.

Reference:
Bruffaerts, Ronny ... [et al] - Childhood adversities as risk factors for onset and persistence of suicidal behaviour. British Journal of Psychiatry, July 2010, 197(1), 20-27

Seel

Parenting

If you've not seen the Parent Manual at www.attach.org, take a look. It is a great resource for parents and professionals. It contains hundreds of specific and useful examples; all consistent with the ATTACh White Paper on Coercion and with the various practice principles of the APA, NASW, APSAC, etc.

Evidence-Based and Emprically Supported Treatment: DDP

A recent article, Becker-Weidman, A., & Hughes, D., (2008) “Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy: An evidence-based treatment for children with complex trauma and disorders of attachment,” Child & Adolescent Social Work, 13, pp.329-337, described the evidence-based and empirically supported treatment, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy. This article presents the empirical support for this treatment and the strong empirical support for the various elements of DDP. Anyone interested can contact me to get a PDF reprint.

New Research on Developmental Functioning

We have completed a study that is due to be published soon that shows that children with Reactive Attachment Disorder and Complex Trauma function at a much younger age than their chronological age. The study used the Vineland Adaptive Scales -II and found that the children in the study had a developmental age notably lower than their chronological age. In addition, we found that their receptive communication score was significantly lower than their expressive communication score, suggesting that at times the child's not "listening" may be caused by the child not understanding what the child was asked, rather than being non-compliance or defiance. There are a number of other important findings for this study, which is the first of it's kind to explore the developmental functioning of this group of children.

The article describes several important implications for clinical practice, parenting, child welfare practice, education, and further research.

I will post additional information about this study in later posts and as soon as the article is published, I will provide a link to it.