An International Perspective on Disasters and Children's Mental Health

Christina W. Hoven, DrPH, MPH is Director of the Global Psychiatric Epidemiology Group, Professor of Epidemiology and Psychiatry, Mailman School of Public Health, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, and Research Scientist, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She was Principal Investigator of the 2002 NYC Board of Education World Trade Center Survey (N= 8,236), which received international recognition as the first investigation to provide a comprehensive evaluation of a large representative sample of children, both distal and proximal to a disaster, leading to her ongoing investigations of the transmission of trauma. Currently, Dr. Hoven is conducting several longitudinal, epidemiologic investigations in the United States, and is involved internationally in a number of studies and other related activities. Lawrence V. Amsel, MD, MPH is a clinical and research psychiatrist and is on the faculty of Columbia University, where he also completed an MPH. This gives him a strong theoretical background in psychiatric epidemiology. In the Global Psychiatric Epidemiology Group (GPEG) at Columbia, he serves as Associate Director and is involved with multiple federally-funded longitudinal cohort studies of children and adolescents who have faced trauma and severe stress. This includes one of the largest cohorts of individuals directly exposed to the WTC attacks as children, who continue to be studied for psychiatric, functional, and physical medicine sequelae of that exposure. Dr. Amsel, who has a mathematics background, has worked to introduce decision science concepts, such as game theory and delay discounting, into psychiatric research. He was instrumental in designing a study of the decision-making processes and subsequent consequences for children exposed to the WTC attacks. Dr. Amsel practices psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital, teaches psychiatry at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and, with the REACH organization, trains primary care physicians to manage psychiatric issues in their practices. Sam Tyano, MD is a Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry at the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine, Israel. He is the co-author of four textbooks on adult, child, and adolescent psychiatry. He is Honorary President of the Israeli Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Association and a previous President of the Israeli Medical Council. He has also chaired the National Board on Mental Health. Dr. Tyano served for 20 years as the Director of the Geha Psychiatric Hospital, and is Fellow of the RCPsych, WPA, IMA, APA, and Doctor Honoris Causa at the Bekhterev Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. His main topics of research and publication are suicide, PTSD, ADHD, and infant psychiatry. Dr. Tyano served as member of the WPA Ethics Committee for six years, and later chaired the committee. Currently, Dr. Tyano is working in an infant psychiatry outpatient clinic.

The plan of the book is to have 12-15 chapters that would represent an international perspective. Each chapter would involve a major disaster (last 10-15 years) and would be focused on the public mental health response to that disaster for the children and adolescents involved. Examples of particular disasters might include: 9/11.- Hurricane Katerina.- Japanese  earthquake and tsunami.- Boko Haram Terrorism in Africa.-Gujurat  Earthquake.- Haiti Earthquake.- Paris Terror Attack.- Adjustment to Immigration.- Resilience to Ongoing Terror.- PTSD in Children and Adolescents.- Children after Earthquake.