Stress Management

Coping with Violence and Disasters
Strategies for Helping Children and Adolescents

 Trauma - What Is It?

"Trauma" has both a medical and a psychiatric definition. Medically, "trauma" refers to a serious or critical bodily injury, wound, or shock. This definition represents a popular view of the term. Psychiatrically, "trauma" has assumed a different meaning and refers to an experience that is emotionally painful, distressful, or shocking, which often results in lasting mental and physical effects.

Psychiatric trauma, or emotional harm, is essentially a normal response to an extreme event. It involves the creation of emotional memories about the distressful event that are stored deep within the brain. In general, the more direct the exposure is to the traumatic event, the higher the risk for emotional harm.³ 

Thus in a school shooting, for example, the student who is injured probably will be most severely affected emotionally. The student who sees a classmate shot or killed, is likely to be more emotionally affected than the student who was in another part of the school when the violence occurred. But even second-hand exposure to violence can be traumatic. For this reason, all children and adolescents exposed to violence or a disaster, even if only through graphic media reports, should be watched for signs of emotional distress.

Source: NIMH

Next Topic: How Children and Adolescents React to Trauma

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