The following news item, reported by Reuters, caused my jaw to drop and then my head to shake:

Childhood trauma is widespread in US

About two-thirds of U.S. children will go through a traumatic event in their childhood but few are likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The finding reveals a certain emotional resiliency in children, but it also suggests that the way children process troubling experiences is different from adults, said William Copeland of Duke University Medical Center, whose study appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Copeland and colleagues conducted annual interviews with 1,420 kids at ages 9, 11, and 13 who were representative of the general U.S. population between 1993 and 2000.

By age 16, 68 percent of those studied had experienced at least one traumatic event, such as the violent death of a loved one, physical abuse by a relative, sexual abuse, fire, natural disaster or a serious accident.

“It was a little shocking to me that it was that high,” Copeland said in a telephone interview.

Despite those numbers, he said few kids end up developing post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which is characterized by reliving the trauma in some way, avoiding places associated with the trauma and feelings of irritability and being on edge.

About 13.4 percent of those who experienced a traumatic event developed some post-traumatic stress symptoms by age 16, but fewer than 0.5 percent met the criteria for the disorder.

But children exposed to trauma had nearly double the rates of other psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety and conduct problems.

“What it says is kids do fine following trauma, but kids who have problems don’t have the types of problems we think they are going to have,” Copeland said. [full text]

“Kids do fine following trauma”?!? How on earth can he assert that when his study also found that “children exposed to trauma had nearly double the rates of other psychiatric disorders“? What this data tells me—and it is something I long ago concluded from my work in a local community mental health clinic—is that the difficulties experienced by children (and adults, to a lesser extent) after exposure to trauma frequently do not match up with the diagnostic criteria codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Children who fail to qualify for a diagnosis of PTSD may still experience significant and persistent difficulties secondary to the trauma. They may manifest symptoms that are traumagenic (i.e., produced by trauma) but do not strictly present as a trauma disorder. In any regard, the fact that “68 percent of those studied had experienced at least one traumatic event” is cause for great concern and suggests that, no matter how resilient children can be, much more needs to be done in this country to lessen both the frequency and impact of trauma on the most vulnerable among us.