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Grants will assist
traumatized children
(December
2007 Issue)
By Catherine Robertson Souter
Childhood trauma is an unfortunate fact of life. According to the
Web site for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a U.S.
Congress-funded initiative, one in four children in the U.S. will
experience a traumatic event by age 16. While not all of these children
will develop signs of traumatic stress, the network's goals to improve
therapeutic services to ameliorate the effects of traumatic stress
on children and adolescents has become a driving force behind several
recently announced grants.
In September, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA), announced the recipients of 15 grants totaling close to
$28 million over four years, as part of the National Child Traumatic
Stress Initiative. The grantees included three in New England: the
Latino Health Institute in Boston, Children's Hospital Boston, and
the Community Counseling Center in Portland, Maine.
"These grants will strengthen the nation's capacity to provide
help to children of all ages who experience traumatic events, such
as interpersonal violence, natural disasters or acts of terrorism,"
said Terry Cline, Ph.D., SAMHSA administrator, in a release.
The $400,000-per-year grant for the Community Counseling Center
in Portland will be used to develop a system of care for the center's
12-town base of communities. The center is the lead agency for the
Greater Portland Children's Trauma Response Initiative, a coalition
of 24 organizations working to provide a range of services from
outreach to education, assessment, triage, training and treatment.
Using the evidence-based Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Model (TF-CBT), the initiative plans to develop treatment and evaluation
services for children and adolescents throughout the region.
"The big picture is that we've been funded by SAMSHA to do a system
of care transformation," says Laura Gottfried, LCSW, vice president
of program services for the counseling center. "In addition to funding
actual services, we will provide leadership in greater Portland
to provide services for children and adolescents who have experienced
trauma."
Children's Hospital Boston received a grant of $599,998 for each
of the four years to develop services for refugee children now living
in the U.S. who have been exposed to the tragedies of war, political
oppression, torture or forced displacement. The grant will fund
the creation of a treatment center that will focus specifically
on working with network centers around the issue of refugee children
and families, raising public awareness and developing and disseminating
effective interventions to resettlement agencies, schools and social
service agencies who work with refugees.
"The number of refugees in this country comes in waves depending
on the international situation," says Glenn Saxe, M.D., associate
chief of psychiatry for research and development and the director
of the Center for Behavioral Science at Children's Hospital Boston/
Harvard Medical School. "Ten years ago, Bosnia was a big issue.
Over the past five to 10 years, wars in Africa have increased the
refugees: Somalia, Sudan, and Sierra Leone. Now, we are expecting
a wave from Iraq."
The Latino Health Institute was awarded $399,999 in the first year
to address the needs of Massachusetts Latino children who have experienced
trauma as well as train mental health care providers in TF-CBT interventions
for working with these clients who often have limited access to
care because of limited bilingual services and a lack of care for
lower-income families, who may be more in need of these types of
services.
"We are thrilled to be among the list of grantees," says M. Barton
Lewis, Ph.D., senior investigator in social science and policy for
the Institute and an assistant professor of public health and family
medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. "If you look at
the list of grantees, they are mostly academic and large providers.
There is a real need here that we want to be able to meet."
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