56th Annual Meeting
Tentative Program Schedule
Please note that this schedule is subject to change. The Program Book distributed at the Annual Meeting will have final information on dates, times, and speakers for each presentation.


Other Programs 34 (open)
Saturday Plenary: Memoirs of a Trauma Hunter: Rooting out the Monsters from Children’s Minds

Lenore C. Terr, M.D.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Author, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at University of California at San Francisco

 

Lenore C. Terr, M.D., known for her work with post traumatic stress disorder in children, has been studying the psychology of normal and disordered children her entire medical career. Dr. Terr graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School with honors. She started as an academic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, during which time she published two pioneering studies on “battered children.” She then went on to practice psychiatry in San Francisco and to teach at the University of California at San Francisco. She is the winner of the Blanche Ittleson Award for her research on childhood trauma. She sees children as young as a year and adults as "old as Methusalah." “Everyone is in some stage of development,” she says with a smile. “If they need medicine, I can prescribe it. I specialize, however, in psychotherapy. But whatever I do, it always comes with some playfulness and humor.”

Dr. Terr is best known for her landmark naturalistic and longitudinal study of the children involved in the 1976 school bus kidnapping in Chowchilla, California (and a comparison group of 25 children 100 miles to the south). It set the standards for what is now accepted as childhood Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Dr. Terr’s first book, Too Scared to Cry (1992) she examined the kidnapping event that occurred in 1976, and then explained its effects in terms of the children’s emotions, thinking, behavior, and contagion. This book emphasizes how trauma not only affected the children she observed, but us all. Dr. Terr’s second book Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found (1994) consists of seven detailed cases designed to illustrate how childhood memories can be repressed, dissociated, otherwise forgotten, or even implanted and later retrieved. Dr. Terr has recently written Magical Moments of Change: How Psychotherapy Turns Kids Around (2008), incorporating contributions from 34 AACAP members and the ongoing true story of a traumatized “wild child.”

Saturday, November 1, 2008: 4:15 PM-5:15 PM
Sheraton IV
Level 4
Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers
Chair:
Robert L. Hendren, D.O.
Co-Presenter:
Lenore C. Terr, M.D.
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