Assessment of a child following a crisis - refreshing to read that an ADHD diagnosis can be misdiagnosed PTSD, and that conduct disorder and ODD (which I think are totally fake on their own outside of the context of traumatic experiences) are also overlapping with trauma & PTSD! And also that sleep impacts all of this. Like of course a traumatized child with sleep disturbances is going to have behavioral problems! Of course they're going to be defiant and irritable! Nightmares and poor sleep has such a huge effect on symptoms - it makes a lot of sense that those kids would get ADHD / conduct diagnoses when its really just trauma. I feel like we've never talked about sleep re: impacting symptom presentation and diagnosis in children, would love to talk more about this.
Burnout and Secondary Trauma
Among Forensic Interviewers
of Abused Children - "Thus, the manner in which
the forensic interviewing services are offered is not conducive to the
development of strong relationships with the victimized children.
The process of forensic interviewing is often structured or
semi-structured, objective, and time-limited, which may reduce the
emotional connectedness between the interviewers and children." I just don't understand how you, as a mental health professional working with abused children, could not have an emotional connection with the children you're interviewing. What is the point of forensic interviewing by someone who isn't the child's clinician, where the goal is to build rapport and have an emotional connection?
"organizational satisfaction is negatively associated with both aspects of burnout and secondary trauma. While these data do not indicate causal relationships, they do follow prior studies that organizational factors play a key role in the development of burnout" - of course!! capitalism!!! when your job doesn't care about you and you're doing this highly emotionally taxing labor without feeling taken care of by the institution / like a member of a community, of course you're more likely to disengage / develop secondary trauma. All the more reason to break down the late capitalist structure of labor for money all day, maximize productivity, individual laborer in a system like a piece of machinery.