The Long-Term Mental Health Needs of Young School Shooting Survivors

Following the Nashville, Tenn., school shooting this week—the third such tragedy in as many months in 2023—one of the many urgent questions confronting the nation revolves around the growing generation of survivors, many of whom are children too young to properly process a traumatic event. When survivors are elementary school students, as the dozens of students at Nashville’s Covenant School are, they won’t necessarily have the language and emotional maturity to express themselves, much less process such trauma. “Young kids are just beginning to learn how to identify and communicate emotions through language, and to find those words,” says Rachel Masi, a clinical psychologist and director of research at Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit organization formed to prevent violence against youth. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Yet, even at young ages, “kids are definitely able to experience trauma and grief,” says Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, a government-funded network of experts who educate and provide treatment recommendations for managing traumatic stress among children. Reading the different ways that children express those emotions falls to their families and teachers, who might be the first to notice the changes in behavior that are often the most common way younger kids signal that they are struggling. “When kids don&...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news