Call it DTD (Developmental Trauma Disorder) or call it C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but just call it something! And call it something quick!

A few weeks ago I reported that the National Child Traumatic Stress Network had formed a committee that was proposing a new diagnosis of Complex PTSD be included in the new Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM).

Today I came across an article about the push of experts in childhood trauma to include a new diagnosis that captures the complexity of traumatized children, but this time it is called Developmental Trauma Disorder…interesting.

This effort, headed by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, medical director of the Trauma Center in Boston and leading authority on childhood trauma, is a way to categorize and treat in a global sense the complex biological and psychological symptoms experienced by children who have been traumatized at a young age and this trauma has greatly impacted their development in ways that the current PTSD diagnosis does not recognize.

“Traumatized kids who come to the attention or schools and social service agencies overwhelmingly experience trauma in the context of intimate relationships,” van der Kolk said.

Hmmm…traumatized children overwhelmingly have problems with intimate relationships = attachment problems, right?

“These children have come to organize their neurobiology and psychology in response to seeing the world as a threatening and overwhelming place, the result of being assaulted by their environment or as a coping mechanism to deal with their internal dysregulation.”

The article goes on to describe how our current diagnosis of PTSD is like “seeing one tree instead of the forest” and doesn’t account for the pervasive nature of the disturbances related to the early childhood trauma.

Because the mental health profession has not taken such a global look at developmental trauma in the past, van der Kolk and his associates believe that many of the children who fit the diagnosis of developmental trauma disorder have been mislabeled with a host of other disorders.

“Approaching each of these problems piecemeal rather than as expressions of a vast system of internal disorganization, runs the risk of losing sight of the forest in favor of one tree. What you call someone has large implications for how you treat someone, even though you may be describing the same phenomenology.”

This leads me to another thought tangent…

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