Introduction and Chapter 1

For our class project I have decided to read The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children can Teach us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry. This book was actually recommended to me in one of my psychology classes a couple years ago and I thought that it would be very interesting to analyze this book for our class.

            For this post I have read the introduction and first chapter of the book. I found the introduction to be quite interesting and informative as to why Perry wrote the book and the perspective that he has in the field of child psychiatry. Perry is not only an M.D. but he also had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. He begins the introduction with the idea that many people have had, and some still have, that children are “resilient” and can “bounce back” without any real psychological treatment after a trauma. Perry found that this idea is categorically false. In fact, he argues that childhood trauma can be even more impactful and damaging than trauma experienced as an adult. Perry most definitely presents extreme examples of childhood trauma throughout the book: from horrific experiences of child abuse to genocide survivors. Perry’s life work has been to try to find a way to help children deal with their trauma and also to educate people about how to deal with these children and in turn to understand human development.

            The first chapter of the book is about a young girl named Tina, age seven, who was one of Perry’s first child patients. Tina had a single mother and her babysitter’s son sexually abused her for about two years from the ages of four to six. As soon as Tina’s mother found out, she stopped the babysitting and the boy was prosecuted. Unfortunately, severe psychological damage had already been done. Tina was brought to therapy because of her behavior in school. She was “aggressive and inappropriate” and also didn’t listen or follow directions very well. This took place in 1987 and psychology, especially child psychology, was not nearly as developed as it is today. So Perry was somewhat at a loss for what to do in order to help Tina. Perry learned to get to know Tina as a person instead of just from her symptoms. Tina’s family life was far from perfect: her single mother had to work two or three jobs to keep afloat and Tina and her younger siblings were often left home alone simply because their mom didn’t trust, and couldn’t afford, people to watch her children while she had to work. Her mother was not neglectful; she simply had so much to do and too little time in which to do it. Dealing with a traumatized child was simply outside of her ability to handle alone. In 1987, neuroscience was still in its infancy and was not widely accepted or used in child psychology. Perry had studied neuroscience and knew of research regarding brain development and how early influences can effects the brain for the rest of a person’s life. Perry believed that Tina’s abuse effected specific neural pathways: those involving coping with stress and dealing with threats. Issues with these stress-response pathways could explain all of Tina’s behavioral issues. It seemed that Tina had an oversensitive stress-response pathway, and though Perry never was able to confirm this assessment, he did have compelling evidence to believe it. Dr. Perry worked with Tina for three years to try and to help her. Tina made a lot of progress but unfortunately it seemed that while she managed to control her impulses and behave more appropriately, she was still unable to fully overcome her trauma. This news was extremely discouraging to Dr. Perry, but through this experience he ultimately decided that he would try to develop treatments that incorporated his knowledge about the brain and how it reacts to trauma especially at an early age.

            So far, I find this book to be very interesting. It does not feel like a book that has been written for the science community, although a child psychiatrist has written it. I really believe that Dr. Perry wrote this book in an attempt to inform the world about child psychology and psychiatry. While I certainly believe that psychology has come a long way over the last generation or so, I know that there is still a stigma involved with psychopathology. In regards to children, there seems to have been a major push to diagnose and medicate children at a very young age without really looking at the reasons behind why a child behaves the way he or she does. Perhaps many children are like Tina, with disruptive and maladaptive behavior, because previous trauma literally changed the way their brain works. Simply medicating a child because they do not behave well does not reach the root of the problem. I am very interested to see what other experiences Dr. Perry has had and how his insight into the child psyche could help regular people learn how to deal with traumatized children.