June 22, 2018

By Gene Beresin, M.D., Steven Schlozman, M.D., Ellen Braaten, Ph.D. and Sara Rattigan, Communications Director

In research that’s been done about kids’ fears, the most frightening thing is losing or being left without a parent.

Through the events at the U.S. southern border in the last weeks, we have watched migrant children live out their worst nightmares in the most deliberately traumatic way.

February 22, 2018

By Sara Rattigan, Communications Director

According to the Urban Dictionary, a family is “a group of people…who genuinely love, trust, care about, and look out for each other… REAL family is a bondage that cannot be broken by any means.

October 26, 2017

By Steven Schlozman, M.D.

Intro music written and performed by Dr. Gene Beresin.Outro music arranged and performed by Dr. Gene Beresin.

Here is my most vivid memory of Halloween:

I’m 8 years old. I have, to my father’s delight, developed an affinity for the “creature-features” that appear on the old UHF stations every Saturday from 10 AM to noon.

October 16, 2017

By Gene Beresin, M.D.

Ali was brave and giving enough to share her story with us in 2015 about the lasting effects of sexual assault on a person’s mental health, long after the experience itself. It is important these stories not be lost, and so we share it again, today.

September 20, 2017

By Julie Kaplow, PhD

Introduction

The Clay Center Team

When it comes to scary events, such as terror acts or natural disasters, our mission at the MGH Clay Center has always been to help parents appreciate the impact of kids seeing images on the screen and hearing about events that are potentially

September 8, 2017

By Gene Beresin, M.D.

Most school age kids are eager to head back to school. Sure, they’ll miss their summer vacation, but the prospect of moving up a grade, seeing friends again, and even having a new teacher is really exciting.

Yet, for or a few kids and their parents it’s kind of a nightmare.

Here are a few stories from years of experience.

June 5, 2017

By Steven Schlozman, M.D.

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Even the term is a mouthful.

We often shorten the diagnosis to its initials—PTSD—but even that linguistic short-cut doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a deceptively complicated syndrome.

June 5, 2017

By Steven Schlozman, M.D.

Sometimes really horrible things happen. Automobiles crash. Assaults, robberies, fires, natural disasters, terrorism—these are all products of our world that we hope to never have to face. Still, no one is immune; adults, children and adolescents endure horrors every day.

January 19, 2017

By Steven Schlozman, M.D.

Bad things happen, and that’s a fundamental fact of life on this planet.

It’s not like we didn’t know this.  Since things have been happening to humans, there’ve been bad things happening to humans, and we’ve had to help our children to deal with them.

May 26, 2016

By Steven Schlozman, M.D.

We wrote earlier this month about the growing acceptance of psychiatric illness among the general population. A number of studies demonstrate that more and more Americans are accepting psychiatric illnesses as equal to other illnesses, and therefore actively seeking treatment.