Treating Childhood Traumatic Grief: A Pilot Study

This prospective longitudinal study examined two competing models, a traditional social support model and a supportive and detrimental social relations model, to clarify the association of PTSD symptoms with supportive and detrimental social relations. Seven-hundred five adolescents living near the epicenter of the Taiwan Chi-Chi Earthquake participated in the study. The models were evaluated and cross-validated using structural equation modeling. The supportive and detrimental social relations model appeared to be a better fit. After further evaluation of three nested versions of the supportive and detrimental social relations model, detrimental social relations was found to partially mediate the relationship between PTSD symptoms 1 and 2 years following the earthquake. The findings suggest that helping adolescents deal with detrimental social relations can contribute to postdisaster adjustment.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Social relations and PTSD symptoms: A prospective study on earthquake‐impacted adolescents in Taiwan

Chen

Weng

et al. 2009

“…The CPSS includes items that assess functional impairment, and has been used with a wide age range, from young children to older adolescents (e.g., Cohen, Mannarino, & Knudsen, 2004). In Israel, there is a paucity of age-appropriate tools for assessing PTSD.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Validation of the child posttraumatic symptom scale in a sample of treatment‐seeking Israeli youth

Rachamim

Helpman

Foa

et al. 2011

We evaluated the psychometric properties of the Hebrew version of the Child Posttraumatic Symptom Scale (CPSS), a self-report measure assessing the severity of posttraumatic distress in youth. Participants (N= 156, ages 8-18) were treatment-seeking victims of diverse traumas. Internal consistency of the Hebrew version in these data was .91 for the total score, .77 for intrusion, .67 for avoidance, and .72 for arousal, similar to the original version. Test-retest reliability over 1 week in a subsample of 45 was r = .81. The point biserial correlation with a clinician-based diagnosis of PTSD was .54. Other convergent and divergent relationships expand the existing literature on the measure and support it as a valuable assessment tool for children exposed to traumatic events.

“…Targeted programs have usually dealt with students exposed to community violence, sexual/physical abuse or single-event trauma and have primarily relied upon trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral models (Deblinger & Heflin, 1996). They have generally created treatment packages comprised of giving psycho-educational material, teaching stress reduction strategies, learning to control trauma-related triggers, modify maladaptive trauma-induced cognitions and processing traumatic experiences (Amaya-Jackson et al, 2003;Cohen & Mannarino, 2004;Stein et al, 2003). Only a limited number of targeted programs that deal with students exposed to war and terrorism such as the UCLA Trauma/Grief Program (Saltzman, Steinberg, Layne, Aisenberg, & Pynoos, 2001) and the Children and War: Teaching Recovery Technique (Ehntholt et al, 2005) have been offered.…”

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confidence: 99%

School‐based intervention for prevention and treatment of elementary‐students' terror‐related distress in Israel: A quasi‐randomized controlled trial

Berger¹,

Pat‐Horenczyk

Gelkopf³

2007

220

144

A school-based intervention for preventing and reducing children's posttraumatic stress-related symptoms, somatic complaints, functional impairment, and anxiety due to exposure to terrorism was evaluated. In a quasi-randomized controlled trial, elementary school students were randomly assigned to an eight-session structured program, "Overshadowing the Threat of Terrorism" or to a waiting list control comparison group. Two months postintervention, the study group reported significant improvement on all measures. The authors conclude that a school-based universal intervention may significantly reduce posttraumatic stress disorder- (PTSD-) related symptoms in children repeatedly exposed to terrorist attacks and propose that it serve as a component of a public mental health approach dealing with children exposed to ongoing terrorism in a country ravaged by war and terrorism.