Enhancing Care for Children:
Complex Trauma as a Challenge and Opportunity
(6 SW Contact Hours) 

This presentation provides a concise summary and update on evidence based approaches for helping children with mental health issues by building resilience to the adverse effects of complex trauma. A practical approach to demystifying complex trauma for frontline personnel and clinicians, and practical skills for building resilience in the workforce as well as for children and families, will be presented for social work, counseling, psychology, marriage and family therapy, and school service providers, advocates and parents.

It will draw on materials from three recent books co-authored or edited by the presenter:

• Treating Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach (2013
• Treating Complex Trauma in Children and Adolescents (2013)
• Hijacked by Your Brain (2013)

The training will enhance care management by increasing attendees’ knowledge about complex trauma and introducing clinical and macro/milieu intervention skills for building resilience to complex trauma.

Learning Objectives

Attendees will be able to:

• Define complex trauma
• Describe how complex traumatic stress reactions can undermine school safety and learning
• Describe how complex trauma and other stress reactions begin as adaptations by the brain
• Describe the skill of focusing and how it can re-set the alarm in the brain
• Describe the difference between reactive versus main goals
• Describe how adults can enhance school safety and learning by re-setting their own alarms

The Association for Mental health & Wellness is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0156

Approved for 6 Social Work Continuning Education Hours 

New York State office of Professions (NYSED) regulations require that participants attend the entire approved educational activity in order to receive continuing education credits, from 9:00am-4:00pm. No partial credit will be given for late arrival or early depature. 

Light breakfast and lunch will be served. 

Scroll down for registration fee information.
No Refunds will be issued for cancellations.

Featured Presenter: Julian Ford, Ph.D.

Julian Ford, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in Connecticut (#2218) and board certified clinical psychologist (American Board of Professional Psychology) and tenured Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and School of Law where he is the Director of the Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice, a Treatment and Services Adaptation Center in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and Director of the Center for Trauma Response, Recovery, and Preparedness since September 2001.

Dr. Ford serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation and European Journal of Psychotraumatology on the Editorial Boards of journals such as Child Abuse & Neglect, Child Maltreatment, and Psychological Trauma, and as Chair of the Presidential Task Force on Child Trauma for the American Psychological Association Division of Trauma Psychology.

In addition to authoring more than 200 published articles and book chapters describing his clinical research and practice in the field of psychological trauma and psychotherapy, he has authored/edited books includin Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 2^nd Edition (2015, Elsevier), Treating Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach (2013, with C. Courtois, Guilford), Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders in Children and Adolescents: Scientific foundations and therapeutic models (2013, with C. Courtois, Guilford), Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: An Evidence-Based Guide (2009, with C. Courtois, Guilford), and Treating Traumatized Children: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery (2008, with D. Brom and R. Pat-Horenczyk, Routledge).

Dr. Ford developed and has conducted randomized clinical trial and effectiveness field trial studies with the Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy (TARGET© University of Connecticut) model for adults with complex PTSD and children with Developmental Trauma Disorder, which has been disseminated to more than 200 behavioral health, criminal justice, child welfare, educational, advocacy, and human services organizations internationally.

Dr. Ford has served on the Board of Directors and as Vice President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a Senior Fellow of the Connecticut Child Health and Development Institute (authoring several policy papers on early childhood and adolescent mental and medical health), and has served as an expert consultant for the United States Attorney General (as principal writer for the 2012 Defending Childhood report of the national Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence), the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate (as co-author of the 2014 Sandy Hook Report), and several national organizations advocating for violence survivors and trauma-informed systems.

No Refunds will be issued for cancellations

Fee Structure