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Biomedical subjects

P T Clements

Publications and source records attributed to P T Clements.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Drawing from experience.

The journey through grief after exposure to a sudden traumatic death is a painful and personal experience for children. This requires therapeutic interventions that explore and facilitate the healing potential within each child. Drawings are an expressive method that can provide a conduit for identifying and understanding issues requiring therapeutic intervention and follow up.

Adult↗

Biology of memory and childhood trauma.

Examples have been presented of children's behaviors that demonstrate the trauma-learning pattern of re-enactment, repetition, and displacement. They become persistent parts of the symptom complex of PTSD. The encapsulation phase occurs when the trauma event occurs and symptoms present themselves, but the events as yet are undisclosed. The trauma-specific behavior patterns, the general hyper-arousal symptoms, and the avoidant, numbing symptoms persist; the emerging disruptive behaviors are not linked to the traumatic event and reactions to the trauma. The response of the child's social and interpersonal context to the internalizing or externalizing behaviors post-trauma, continue shaping the internal cognitive schema of the child. When the child is unable to link ongoing, self-defeating, disruptive behavior to trauma experience, the underlying fear persists. This interferes with the child's ability to modulate emotions either through altering the persistence of refractory, self-limiting cognitive schema or the inability to use new experience to develop and grow. The flexibility of children to discriminate new information may be lost; the children are either numb to new information or hyperalert and perceive danger. Issues for treatment include children's distress over memories of the trauma and the lack of capacity to learn and develop from new interpersonal experiences. It has been our experience that nurses first must help the child relearn flexibility through self-observation, the element of self-soothing and calming behaviors, processing of new information, and strengthening of social relationships. With new and strengthened personal resources, the child then is able to begin to process the traumatic memories.

Adolescent↗

Care after chaos: use of critical incident stress debriefing after traumatic workplace events.

CISD is a specific model of group debriefing, which can be used to accelerate recovery from traumatic work-place events. The impact of critical incidents may be debilitating-from recurrent intrusive images, persistent fear, displaced anger, guilt, and isolation. CISD can accomplish psychological closure, prevention, and mitigation of traumatic stress, and promote return to normalcy, benefiting the individual, organization, and the community at large. The field of critical incident stress management is open to advanced practice nurses who seek to apply their crisis-intervention expertise within a nontraditional role and workplace setting. With specialized training, the advanced practice nurse may pursue a career as a crisis-response provider, working independently or with an established CISM team. Practice requirements include CISM certification, along with the acquisition of a referral source. The prevention and mitigation of traumatic stress can yield a rewarding career in CISM.

Crisis Intervention↗