Workshop Program in Pakistan to
Treat Traumatized Children
Professor Syed Arshad Husain, Chair of the WFMH Committee on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and head of the International Centre for Psychosocial Trauma at the University of Missouri, USA, is extending his work to provide training to support traumatized children. He has made more than fourteen trips to Bosnia since 1994 to present training programs there for teachers and community leaders. In the spring of 1998 he presented a series of workshops in Moscow, Russia, and on 24-26 November he gave a similar training program in Karachi, Pakistan.
Professor Husain took a team of four with him to Pakistan, including Dr. Barry Jay, Secretary of his WFMH Committee, and Professor Anie Sanentz Kalayjian, Co-chair of the WFMH Human Rights Committee.
Also in the team were Wayne Anderson, Professor Emeritus from the University of Missouri, and Joseph Lamberti, a psychiatrist from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Drs. Anderson and Lamberti had traveled previously with Professor Husain to Bosnia.
In Karachi, a city of nine million people, there are frequent random acts of violence including sniper shootings, bombings and abductions. The workshops were designed to help family general practitioners, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists to treat children suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can result from a variety of causes ranging from automobile accidents and serious injuries to death of family members, community disasters, terrorism, and sexual assault and abuse.
During the sessions Professor Husain discussed the factors which make people more vulnerable or more resilient to the effects of personal loss and psychological trauma. He described the roles of attachment, bonding and temperament in the impact of the traumatic experience. The training emphasized the value of a nurturing adult being available to empower the child to feel more secure and help him or her to deal with the trauma. Professor Anderson described Critical Incident Debriefing, a step-by-step procedure used after a traumatic incident, which has been shown to be effective in reducing the incidence of PTSD. Joseph Lamberti, Barry Jay and Anie Kalayjian gave presentations on other treatments for trauma.
After the program in Karachi the team travelled to Quetta to give a workshop during the Pakistan Psychiatric Society’s annual conference. The response to the workshops in both places was extremely favourable and the group was invited back, with requests to extend the training to other locations. Professor Husain has already returned in February to give an advanced workshop in Karachi and another in Lahore.
–Barry Jay, with additional material from Anie Kalayjian.