A world renowned child psychiatrist, FBI consultant and child advocate takes us inside his pioneering work with trauma victims. Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry has helped children faced with unimaginable horror: genocide survivors, starving youngsters raised in cages, toddlers who witnessed their parents' murders, teenagers kidnapped by paedophiles and other survivors of disaster. Dr Perry draws on his life's work, as well as the latest discoveries from evolutionary biology and neuroscience, to offer important new insight into what happens when a child is exposed to stress and to describe the innovative interventions that help minimize the long-term effects of trauma. He also shows how trauma symptoms can be mistaken for other psychiatric disorders like ADHD - and what this means for treatment. Perry's perspective on trauma and adversity - conveyed through compelling true stories - will be enormously valuable to all who care for and about young children. Perry has done what few other researchers have done: by studying and treating severely traumatized youngsters over months and years - rather than just in the aftermath of the experience - he is able to draw important conclusions about the best ways to help all children recover and thrive.

Author Biography

Dr Bruce D Perry is the Senior Fellow of the Child Trauma Academy, a Houston-based non-profit organization which promotes innovations in service, research and education in child maltreatment and childhood trauma. He has served as a consultant to the FBI and is the former Chief of Psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital. Maia Szalavitz is an award-winning journalist who specializes in science and health. The author of Help at Any Cost, she lives in New York.