Paris to Unravel Best Ways to Treat Traumatic Stress in Children
Boston University School of Social Work announces today that Assistant Professor Ruth Paris, PhD will lead an evaluation study of Project BRIGHT (Building Resilience through Intervention: Growing Healthier Together), a new family-centered program for children suffering from traumatic stress due to a parent’s substance abuse. As part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative, funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for $1.2 M, the project will span three years.
Starting in January, Project BRIGHT will create trauma informed services, led by the Institute for Health and Recovery (IHR), in collaboration with Jewish Family and Children’s Service’s Center for Early Relationship Support, and Boston Medical Center’s Child Witness to Violence Project. The program is designed to address traumatic stress in children, ages birth to five years old, and their parents, who are in recovery from substance abuse and co-occurring disorders. Families will be served at eight Family Residential Treatment (FRT) programs across Massachusetts. These FRTs provide intensive services and treatment to 175-250 families per year.
“Most of these families,” says Paris, “have children aged five and under, who have also suffered devastating effects from a parent’s substance abuse and mental illness. These families may have previously been homeless, may have engaged in criminal activities to support their drug habits, may have been involved with the state’s child welfare agency, and have been witnesses to and victims of trauma, ranging from living on the streets to experiencing physical violence, all while pregnant or parenting small children. The effects of these types of traumatic events on young children are well-documented: they disrupt children’s abilities to develop secure attachment and adaptive coping skills, impeding their social-emotional development and placing them at risk for future problems.”
Treating such young children, and their parents, requires support of the parent-child relationship in order to be effective and sustained. Over three years, Project BRIGHT will offer Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), developed specifically to address the impact of traumatic experiences on young children and their parents. This specialized intervention offers therapeutic support to children and their parents in building new understandings and behaviors that promote developmental progress, resilience, and emotional stability. It will be adapted to address the specific needs of families in treatment for substance abuse.
Dr. Paris and her team, including the School’s Center for Addictions Research and Services Director Dr. Lena Lundgren, and Deborah Chassler, senior research associate, will evaluate Project BRIGHT’s activities, interventions, methods, and implementation to assess their effectiveness. Additionally, Dr. Paris will train program staff on evaluation measures and procedures.
As an Assistant Professor of Clinical Practice at the School, Dr. Paris also serves as the director of the Family Therapy Certificate Program. Her research focuses on family interventions and family processes, and she has evaluated and developed family-based interventions for isolated, first-time mothers in a home visiting program; immigrant/refugee mothers receiving home-based services from bilingual/bicultural paraprofessionals; mothers with postpartum depression and their infants in a dyadic home-based clinical treatment program; and military service members with children under 5 years of age returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. Dr. Paris has also served as a consultant on two federally funded projects with teams at Harvard School of Public Health, focused on intimate partner violence, and she is currently an advisor on a K01 award recently funded by the NIH focused on beliefs and attitudes regarding corporal punishment in African American and Caucasian urban communities.
Learn more about Dr. Paris’ research