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Following disasters like 9/11, the recent tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, children with poor affect regulation, avoidant defenses, and deficient social skills are at special risk for developing traumatic stress reactions. Our aim is to develop a supportive-expressive and cognitive skill-building therapeutic intervention that can be widely used with post-disaster populations to reduce emotional distress and promote healthy adaptation in children.
Many areas of family life are pulled into workbooks using children's drawings and narratives. Topics the caregiver requests the child to draw and write about include parental and sibling relationships, schooling, hobbies, and self-concepts. Traumas the child may have experienced are potentially disclosed. Potential research topics covered that may be of special interest to psychoanalytic researchers include sections on “My best dreams in my whole life,” “My best dreams since the hurricanes,” “My worst dreams in my whole life,” “My worst dreams since the hurricanes.” Throught tapping into memories that can be coded, it may be possible to ascertain if hurricane and other disaster victims have fewer benevolent or positively toned early childhood memories than do other groups of children. A mental health checklist (a parent and teacher scorable three-page yes/no list, focused on posttraumatic symptoms, prior adversities, and major mental illnesses) is provided for the child to complete. Teachers are given a scoring system to determine whether a child is likely in need of additional services.
We have been exploring the use of a guided narrative therapy intervention in the context of a supportive-expressive and cognitive skillbuilding therapy to enhance children's coping skills. Through use of a formal narrative method, the child builds cognitive skills including the capacity to attend to painful emotions and to express and master painful feelings using both verbal and nonverbal means.
The guided activity workbook developed