“You feel horrible, but you don’t quite know why. You are filled with a scene of doom. You feel anxious, unable to sleep and dreadful. Your life is in a constant state of stress. You seem to be unable to relax and enjoy much of anything. You can’t seem to set goals or make decisions about your life. Your self-esteem and self-confidence is eroding.” (Snow) The way in which a person suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder feels evokes much more gloom than that of a healthy human being. Now take that depressing gloom and envision it in a young child who should be off playing in the backyard or drawing rainbows with sidewalk chalk. Unfortunately PTSD is no longer a disorder we see only in war veterans; PTSD is now commonly being developed in young children across the world. These children walk around like zombies, withdraw from their peers, reverse developmentally, and in severe cases experience dramatic flashbacks from the time the trauma occurred. While there has been copious amounts of research and treatment plans for adults who experience PTSD, there is little knowledge on treatment options when dealing with young children because it is though that “they will grow out of it”. Within the past decade, research has proven that there are long-lasting medical and emotional effects when children are not properly treated after suffering trauma. Further research and knowledge must be gained to develop effective treatment options for these children in order to reverse the effects of the trauma before it impacts their adult lives. 

Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder, or more commonly referred to as PTSD, is a debilitating disorder that develops in people that witness a natural disaster, serious accident, terrorist attack, death of a loved one, war, violent personal assault such as rape, or other life-threatening events. PTSD is usually accompanied by a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, or a combination of both.  Many people who suffer from PTSD experience symptoms of flashbacks, nightmares, or traumatic memories when national travesties occur such as the September 11th terrorist attacks or the Boston bombing of 2013(ADAA). These attacks that occur are difficult to deal with and many adults struggle with how accept even though they understand what is going on. Children end up handling these traumas very differently than adults and each reaction varies depending on their age and the circumstance. Anxiety disorders affect one in eight children (ADAA2).

“Exposure to extreme life stressors in the prepubertal period, such as loss of parents or sexual or physical abuse, has been related to an increased risk for depression and suicide” (PMC). While some anxiety is completely normal for children and part of their development but when it develops into uncontrollable nervousness, withdraw from peers and school, extreme shyness, and avoiding places and activities is when it really becomes an issue where help is sought out. Not to mention in the mid 90’s the CDC and Kiser Permanente released that exposure to childhood trauma increases the risk for to develop seven out of ten of the leading causes of death (Harris). “Anxiety and depression is treatable, but 80 percent of kids with an anxiety disorder and 60 percent of kids with depression are not getting treatment, according to the 2015 Child Mind Institute Children’s Mental Health Report.” Children who go untreated have lower performance in school, overall lower test scores, miss out on developmental mile stones and social experiences, and are twice as likely to engage in substance abuse (ADAA2).

The Syrian Up-rising that has been ongoing for almost two years now is having a startling effect on the children within the war zone. Many children have been taken out of this hostile environment and relocated in refugee camps where they can begin to attend school again. The classrooms within the refugee camps are filled with pictures created by the students but upon closer examination the pictures reveal drawing of air bombings, burning buildings, and deceased loved ones. Some of these children refused to speak for the first month upon arrival or are frequently missing a majority of the week, some have dramatic flashbacks where they believe they are still in the middle of the war much like many war veterans have. And then there are stories of “a 15-year-old girl is afflicted with nightmares after she saw hundreds of militia members affiliated with the regime approach her house and, fearing rape, prepared to throw herself off the balcony. A 5-year-old girl whose family moved her from one refugee camp to another has lost all sense of security and involuntarily urinates several times a day. A 14-year-old girl who saw a 20-year-old shot to death outside her home now refuses to be alone for even a minute” (Morello).Within the refugee camps there are no phycologist who can give these children the special treatment that they need, instead they have gynecologist and civil engineers filling that position because that’s all they could get, clearly not specialist. The extent of the treatment they are providing these children is to “be a good example for your friends” and talk about the problems that have followed them from Syria (Morello). When looking towards the future, school officials and official psychiatrics that visit the school have hopes that these children will simply “find a way to cope and move on” because “memories are short-lived” so the belief is “that most eventually return to their normal routines with no long-lasting repercussions” (Morello). Perhaps that is true and more than likely most will recover form PTSD but research has shown that there are many long lasting effects that these children will face in their adult lives if they do not get proper treatment. 

“Risk of having severe post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms was 10 times higher in patients reporting sexual abuse after age 12 than in those reporting sexual abuse before age 12. Relative risk of having severe depressive symptoms was higher for those abused before the age of 12 than for those abused after the age of 12” (PMC) A study was conducted at ---- that was trying to find the correlation between the age in which trauma occurred and the severity of PTSD that patient’s had. This study used sixty patients who had all be formal diagnosed with PSTD. In this study the sixty participants who had be formally diagnosed with PSTD with subject to a 56 question interview that measured the amount of trauma in a subject’s life during between early childhood and teenage years. Factors involved in the study included physical, sexual, psychological, and general trauma and evaluated according to the frequency, stage of development, duration, and impact on the subject. The average “age for the reported trauma exposure was 11.7 ± 3.7 years old” (PMC). Of the children who witnessed or encountered trauma before the age of 12, half were considered to have severe PTSD, thirty percent had moderate PTSD, with only twenty percent labeled as having mild PTSD (PMC). The study found that the children exposed the earliest were the ones who were more likely to develop severe and prominent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  

In a Ted Talk with Dr. Nadine Harris she explains to the crowd that in high doses, exposure to trauma at an early age effects brain development, the way our DNA is read and transcribed, our immune and hormonal systems, have triple the risk for heart and lung disease, not to mention a twenty year difference in life expectance, yet most doctors are not trained or required to do routine screening or treatment (Harris). Dr. Harris herself was not trained to deal screening or treatment when presented with these issues, protocol was to refer the children to either mental health or social services. She went to work for California pacific medical center where she had the opportunity to open a clinic in one of the poorest neighborhoods inside of San Francisco. Many Children were being referred to Dr. Harris for ADHD but when she did thouro history and physical work-ups she found that a vast majority of them had be exposed to severe trauma. Concerned that she was missing something important, she decided she needed to find the root of all of these issues. She even related it back to something she leaned during residency: “If you see 100 kids who dink from the same well and all of them have diaria, you can write dose after does of anti-biotics, or you can go to the source and find out what the hell is wrong with that well” (Harris). She began to read everything she could about how exposure to trauma effects the developing brains and bodies of children when she came along research done by the CDC and Kiser Permanente that correlated effects between adverse childhood traumas and health outcome in adults: the more trauma exposure the worse the health outcome. Hepatitis and heart desise is two and half times higher than those who have not experienced trauma, suiside was twelve times higher and lung cancer three times as high
