Traumatic stress and children.

On October 2, 1990, we presented "Traumatic Stress and Children" at the "Children at Risk" Third National Conference on Health Care for the Poor and Underserved held by Meharry Medical College. The conference presented CMHC's research team the opportunity to highlight our continued work on the issue of traumatic stress in children in print. The article briefly covered CMHC's study of violence exposure in 536 second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grade students that had caught the attention of Ms. Johnnie Dyson in 1989. As a practicing clinical social worker who was working in a school we surveyed, Ms. Dyson saw first hand the results of the violence we had been accenting. As a result, she went on to publish "The Effect of Family Violence on Children's Academic Performance and Behavior" in the January 1990 Journal of the National Medical Association. She presented two cases of six students, all of whom had extensive histories of family violence, including a murder of a close family member. These cases illustrated the extreme impact of violence in the lives of African-American children. "Traumatic Stress and Children" also highlighted a previously done CMHC research team study on over a thousand school children aged 10 to 19 years done during the 1987 1988 school year. The complete result from this study was published in two articles. "Covictimization of African-American Children Who Witness Violence: Effects on Cognitive, Emotional and Behavioral Development" was published in the March 1991 Journal of the National Medical Association by Bambade Shakoor and Deborah Chalmers. "African American Youth Encounters with Violence: Results From the Community Mental Health Council Violence Screening Project" by Edwina Uehara, Deborah Chalmers, Esther Jenkins, and Bambade Shakoor was published in the Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 6, July 1996. When we began the work in the early 1980's, we had no idea how great an impact our work would have.