Once high school social worker Janet Craig turned in some essays she forgot about being nominated for a prestigious honor until Peabody Energy awarded her Tuesday by surprise.

"I'm shaky; I'm shocked, I'm overwhelmed," said Craig outside her office after receiving the Peabody Energy Leaders in Education award and a $1,000 check around lunchtime Tuesday at Civic Memorial High School in Bethalto.

Nonprofit and volunteer veterans groups, along with the Department of Defense, rightly focus on the mental health needs of the warriors who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their children deserve attention as well. After more than a decade of living with the separations and uncertainties endemic to military life, many children from military families are paying the emotional and psychological costs.

Approximately one-quarter of high school freshmen and juniors with either a parent or a sibling in the military say they have had suicidal thoughts during the past year, according to a new study that colleagues and I conducted in California. Some of their nonmilitary peers also said they had seriously thought about killing themselves in the past year, but at frequencies -- roughly 19 percent of freshmen and about 17 percent of juniors -- much closer to the national rate.

We used data generated by the California Healthy Kids Survey, which is annually administered to 7th, 9th and 11th graders in public schools by the state's Department of Education. About 13 percent of the 14,000 teenagers we studied had a military connection. Previous mental health studies have focused on military children in clinical settings receiving treatment, which made it difficult to estimate the extent of the problem.  Read more.

Disorganized Attachment and Trauma in Children 

Abstract:  Children who experience trauma often experience a disruption in the formation of attachment with their primary caregiver. This research aims to address how this disruption may lead to attachment disorders in children, and what developmental challenges children exposed to trauma may face. Using a qualitative interview case study of a children's mental health professional, this study examines the impact of trauma on attachment based on the experiences of this clinician. This study set out to investigate what treatment methods are currently used to treat children with histories of trauma and attachment disorders. From the qualitative interview 4 main themes were found and are labeled as the following: behavioral issues, reunification, awareness of attachment theory and trauma, and treatment methods. The research findings and current literature both address the importance of the clinician being aware of attachment theory and trauma informed care within current practice and treatment methods. However, the findings reveal some gaps in service and the need for a more systematic approach in how to work with children with attachment disorders and trauma histories. Further research is needed on practices used by mental health clinicians in a wide array of treatment settings in order to generalize findings.  Complete paper. 

A hormone that spikes when women are giving birth may hold promise as an autism therapy, according to a new study from a team at Yale University.  Years of research has revealed the potent effects of oxytocin, a hormone that is naturally released during childbirth and has been nicknamed the "love hormone" for the role it appears to play in pair bonding, whether between couples or mother and baby. Then researchers began to administer the hormone to people in non-romantic situations, to see whether it would change their behavior.

The results were intriguing, suggesting that it helped increase cooperation and trust. As the hormone's ability to enhance social responses was replicated in other studies, researchers began to wonder whether oxytocin might be helpful for people with autism spectrum disorders, which are characterized by impaired social functioning.

Children's Foundation Medical Grants for Children in Need