Giving Words to the Unsayable: The Healing Power of Describing What Happened

Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D., is Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair in Infant Mental Health, Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs at UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital. She is on the board and past president of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Her research involves treatment outcome studies with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers from low-income and underrepresented minority groups with a high incidence of exposure to family and community violence, maternal depression, and other risk factors. She is the senior developer of Child–Parent Psychotherapy, which has shown efficacy in comparison to other interventions in five randomized studies with young children and their mothers. She currently directs the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a four-site center of the SAMHSA-funded National Child Traumatic Stress Network. She has authored a book on toddler development, two treatment manuals, and numerous articles and chapters on risk and protective factors for mental health in infancy and early childhood, child–parent attachment, and cultural competence in intervention and treatment. She was born in Paraguay and received her professional training in Israel and the United States. This cross-cultural experience informs her commitment to closing the mental health services gap for low-income and minority young children and their families.
Correspondence should be addressed to Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco, Box 0852, 1001 Potrero Avenue, SFGH 20, Room 2100, San Francisco, CA 94143. E-mail: