Revealing the Inner World of Traumatised Children and Young People
| Pages | 142-143 |
| Published date | 17 September 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMH-09-2018-074 |
| Date | 17 September 2018 |
| Author | Woody Caan |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Mental health,Public mental health |
By Christine Bradley and
Francia Kinchington
Jessica Kingsley
London
2017
ISBN 978-1-78592-019-6
Keywords Child mental health, Attachment,
Residential care, Trauma
Review DOI 10.1108/JPMH-09-2018-074
This book by Christine Bradley (with short
contributions by four others) gives much food
for thought, at a time when both mental health
practitioners and policy-makers are beginning
to take adverse childhood experiences
seriously. The sort of residential units in which
the author once assessed so many traumatised
children are much less common now. The
reactions of children struggling with adversity,
however, are all too familiar today. In the
twenty-first century, there is an urgent need to
develop more “trauma-informed”mental health
services (Rose et al., 2012). Bradley’sformative
encounter with the Therapist Donald Winnicott
was in 1970, and I doubt anyone developing
services now would want to turn back the clock
48 years –but today’s innovators could learn a
lot from her generation.
Bradley’s book contains much material
around a child’s interior development,
attempting to int egrate many dimen sions of
the challenging wo rld in which they
participate: “Is th at really my song?”At the
heart of her practice was a simple
commitment: “The primary task in our work
is to meet the emoti onal needs of
traumatised children”.
In particular, Bradley maintains an elegant
style of writing. For example, describing the
importance of “attuned relationships”with
adults in the organisation of a young brain,
she writes: “If attuned, interactions are like
perfectly co-ordinated dances, matched by
rhythm and style, whereas chronically
misattuned interactions are devastating in
their impact and reach, and constitute
repeated traumatic experiences. Dancing
with a partner who does not see you or sees
only what they want to see, or hates dancing
with you, is incredibly painful and damaging”.
Myself, I was a Student in the 1970s and so I
can recognise terms like “fragile integration”.If
this book has a second edition, I would strongly
recommend that the publishers Jessica
Kingsley include a glossary of its jargon, as
readers born after about 1990 may find some of
the terminology unfamiliar. In general, though,
the recommendations for work with children are
clear and to the point: “All good experiences
need to have a beginning, a middle and an end
to make them into a complete experience”.
In terms of public mental health, I hope future
research will work out why some traumas are
more overwhelming than others (Myles et al.,
2018). Here, I am glad that Bradley gives a
voice to some young people. For example,
this is the end of a poem by a 14-year-old boy
who shortly afterwards committed suicide:
“[…]. And when he lay alone lookingat the sky,
It was big and blue and all of everything,
But he wasn’t anymore.
He was square inside
And brown
And his hands were stiff
And he was like everyone else.
And the things inside him that needed
saying didn’t need it anymore.
It had stopped pushing, It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else”.
Future trauma-informed services will need
evidence of goodoutcomes. I was struck by a
follow-up study of Bradley’s Cotswold
Community. After her service changed to a
therapeutic community, the evaluation found
the proportion of young residents that moved
on to prison or to other costly forms of “care”
then “droppedfrom 85 per cent to 5 per cent”.
Woody Caan
Woody Caan is Professorial Fellow at the
RSPH, Cambridge, UK.
Revealing the Inner
World of Traumatised
Children and Young
People
PAGE142
j
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH
j
VOL. 17 NO. 3 2018, pp. 142-143, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1746-5729
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