Product Description

A world-renowned child psychiatrist takes us inside his pioneering work with trauma victims to offer a groundbreaking new perspective on how stress and violence affect children's brains--and how they can be helped to heal.

Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry has treated children faced with unimaginable horror: genocide survivors, witnesses, children raised in closets and cages, and victims of family violence. Here he tells their stories of trauma and transformation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3693 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780465056538
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is the Senior Fellow of The Child Trauma Academy. He has served as a consultant to the FBI and is the former Chief of Psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital, as well as former Vice-Chairman for Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. He lives in Houston, Texas, and Alberta, Canada.

Maia Szalavitz is an award-winning journalist who specializes in science and health. She is the author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids and Recovery Options: The Complete Guide, written with Joseph Volpicelli, M.D., Ph.D. She lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant and heartening
Assisted by a talented science writer, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry presents a series of heartbreaking stories of children severely damaged by trauma. But that's only one side of this remarkable book. The other side is how many of these profoundly damaged children were assisted to heal.

Perry explains his "neurosequential" approach that sequentially targets brain regions left undeveloped by abuse or neglect. He presents compelling cases to illustrate how the child's age at the time of the abuse or neglect will determine the gaps in neurological development and how his interventions sequentially target those developmental gaps. For children whose brains were stalled out in infancy, for example, therapy may start with healing touch or rhythm before moving on to higher brain activities.

The focus, always, is on the child's humanity. Perry explains the importance of listening and letting the child set the pace. He warns of the damage caused by well-intentioned but poorly trained therapists who push children to open up, or who administer punitive interventions in the guise of treatment. Healing is not about a specific technique administered in cookbook fashion but, rather, about love, and restoring shattered human connections.

This is an enlightening and heartening book and a real page-turner to boot. The neurological underpinnings of the trauma theory are presented in clear English accessible to anyone who can read. If you're a mental health professional, psychologist, or psychiatrist, you'll love this book. If you're a parent or a teacher, it's also for you. Whoever you are, it's for you. I guarantee you will be engaged and inspired.

Brilliant and human
This is a powerful and insightful book. The patient stories are genuine and heart-wrenching, and the lessons about the human brain and its development ring true and offer refreshing and valuable perspectives on how the mind works. Dr. Perry shows, with a lucid honesty that belies any crass self-promotion, his therapeutic mastery. At the same time, the prose flows smoothly and I found myself easily drawn in to the very personal stories of these troubled children. In many cases I felt a palpable relief at the happy endings, in which a few basic insights into the core psychological issues led to a beneficial and effective course of therapy. I only wish the book was longer -- I devoured it quickly and could have happily read many more chapters! My only question now is who to lend it to first...

Hopeful book I won't quickly forget
This was a book I had a hard time putting down. The author is obviously highly intelligent and compassionate. After reading it, I want to read more by him, but it appears only articles--no books--are available. The book, without going into too much medicalese, explains how the brain is affected by trauma. The true life stories coupled with neurological explanations offer hope to those who have been traumatized and those who would understand them. I was astonished by the last chapter--or maybe it was one of the last?--that presented, for me, a novel way of influencing a child's peer group.