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Guided Activity Workbooks helping children and teenagers cope and thrive after a disaster We have created a series of workbooks designed to help children, teenagers and families overcome bad memories and fears. These are simple and straightforward guides, which encourage healthy expression, learning and coping. Inspired by the success of the PLHB workbooks which helps stabilize foster children's placements, specialized guided activity workbooks for disaster relief were developed to support children's self-directed expression of memories, feelings, or dreams and to elicit verbalization and representation of traumatic events. The workbooks are carefully designed to help children externalize their internal states. This powerfully supports therapeutic integration of disrupting or disturbing experiences and can lead to recovery from trauma or potentially traumatizing events. My Story About The Hurricane
My Flood Story
My Fire Story
My Tornado Story My Earthquake Story My Sichuan Earthquake Story My Personal Life Story About Being Homeless My Personal Story about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita My Personal Life History Book (PLHB) The PLHB Method: A Manual for Preventive Psychotherapy with Foster Children My Book About the War and Terrorism
My Book about the Attack on America
My Story about The War in Iraq
My Gulf War Story
My Kosovo Story How To Order /Downloads for individuals and families
An Example of the Use of a Guided Activity Workbook
Resulting in Children’s Mental Health Improvements
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, causing extensive flooding, immense destruction, and mass human suffering, we began collaboration with Mercy Corps to produce and distribute a guided activity workbook within a week after the disaster. To evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, the American Psychoanalytic Foundation and Mercy Corps jointly funded a study of the resource. The objective of the resource was to decrease post-traumatic symptoms in several hundred among the evacuated fifth to eighth grade children attending a displaced school, temporarily based in Houston. Fortuitously, Tulane University was also relocated to Houston and the project had the advantage of an independent psychiatrist’s involvement in setting up and studying the effectiveness of the project, including the supervision of interns to introduce and follow the children’s use of the workbook. The formerly New Orleans student population was 100 percent African-American, the majority (82 percent) from impoverished areas of New Orleans that were widely devastated by Katrina. The University of California at Los Angeles Child Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Index (PTSD-RI) was administered to the children prior to beginning work on the Hurricane Workbook and again after three months of working with the specially designed psychoanalytically informed workbooks. Mercy Corp eventually distributed more than 12,000 workbooks throughout the region. My Personal Story About Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: A Guided Activity Workbook for Children, Families and Teachers was given to each child. Each worked on it in class for 30 minutes weekly for three months. Post-traumatic symptom level scores among 100 twice-tested adolescents declined sharply. The improvement was statistically highly significant (p=.0001). It confirmed compelling clinical observations that even classes of highly agitated and overactive inner city children almost immediately became very calm and focused when using the activity workbooks.
-Cited in Early Childhood Psychotherapy In The Classroom, Chapter 11, Helping Traumatized Children, by Gilbert Kliman MD, © 2008
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