Richard Meiser-Stedman: The science of horror: post-traumatic stress in children and adolescents

Exposure to trauma is a common experience in childhood; there are approximately two million child and adolescent attendances at hospital Emergency Departments each year, and at least 50,000 children are on an “at-risk” register at any given time. The past twenty years has seen a spectacular increase in the study of children’s reactions to such experiences. In this talk I will outline how mental health researchers now conceptualise children’s reactions to life-threatening experiences (such as road traffic accidents, assaults and war), with a “warts and all” emphasis on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I will then review the psychological mechanisms proposed to be underpinning persistent PTSD and the evidence for psychological treatments for this disorder in youth