Despite promising evidence that school-based health centers (SBHCs) and school mental health (SMH) services can reduce disparities in access to mental health care for underserved populations, little is known about what predicts retention of youth in SMH services. This study aimed to identify individual- and school-level factors associated with…

Speaking out against decades of injustice and challenging deficit perceptions of young learners and their families, "It's Not About Grit" pulls back the veil, revealing the social systems that marginalize and stigmatize mostly poor, urban students of color and their communities. At the same time, author Steven Goodman, founding executive…

This timely book provides current research and skill-building information on Disaster Mental Health Counseling for counselors, educators, students, and mental health responders in agencies, schools, universities, and private practice. Recognized experts in the field detail effective clinical interventions with survivors in the immediate,…

Tribal colleges and universities are working in their communities to identify factors that negatively impact health and are training the next generation of healthcare workers to deal with them. And they are making a difference--not just in the lives of their students, but in the lives of future patients.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a common and pervasive problem. There is a positive correlation between ACEs and difficulties across the lifespan. Unlike healthy forms of stress, ACEs have a detrimental impact on the developing brain. There are three types of trauma: acute, chronic, and complex. Most ACEs are considered complex trauma,…

As the complexity and cultural diversity in contemporary Canadian schools increases, educators are challenged to respond to the unique cultural, socioemotional, and learning needs of students whose families are fleeing hardship, global conflict, or persecution to seek safe haven in Canada. Like those in most major urban centres in Canada, schools…

Objective: Studies have consistently demonstrated a lack of agreement between youth and parent reports regarding youth-witnessed violence. However, little is known about whether disagreement is associated with poorer outcomes and less utilization of mental health services. The purpose of the current study was to examine disagreement among youth…

Scholars Kali Tal and Cathy Caruth express the importance of trauma literature as "the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" both to the victim and to the community," and to tell "a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." In "Solar Storms" Linda Hogan vividly recounts the consequences of…

International service learning courses, cultural immersion projects, and international disaster response teams have provided valuable aid, services, supplies and programs to trauma-impacted communities across the globe. Many colleges and universities support global learning and the creation of global citizens, and this ethic is reflected in many…

This study reframes Yvonne Vera's novel, "The Stone Virgins" as a potential secondary school literature text in the Zimbabwean curriculum through which a pedagogy of expiation could be re-imagined. The argument is that the traumatic experiences that Zimbabwe has gone through as a nation require open re-engagement and debate. The study…

Background: The Building Emotion and Affect Regulation (BEAR) program is a theory-based group intervention for enhancing resilience in children, with a focus on strengthening emotion regulation. The BEAR is a 6-session protocol for children aged 7-12 who have been subject to traumatic life events. Objective: This paper presents the guiding…

Cyberspace has added a new dimension to the ecology of children made the subjects of sexual abuse images distributed online. These images cannot be permanently removed and can continue to circulate in cyberspace forever. A review of the current literature suggests that helping professionals are not consistently aware of or do not probe…

Research on childhood posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is sparse. This is partly due to the limited availability of empirically validated measures for children who are insecure readers. The present study examined the reliability and validity of a cartoon-based measure of PTSD symptoms in children exposed to a disaster. Cartoons were generated…

"Overgeneral memory" refers to difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories and is consistently associated with depression and/or trauma. The present study developed a downward extension of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) given the need to document normative developmental changes in…

This article describes the findings from a study of the transformation experiences of African war survivors to understand how the process of transformative learning is experienced in posttrauma contexts. A narrative inquiry was conducted based on 12 interviews of African war survivors in Canada and 6 autobiographical accounts of survivors living…