AFRO-NETS> Children suffering from PTSD following violent events

[Christian Labadie <CLabadie@t-online.de>]

Children suffering from PTSD following violent events
-----------------------------------------------------

Hello,

During my graduate research I concentrated on the design of 
pulse sequences for magnetic resonance imaging and the analysis 
of relaxation. Two years ago, I asked my former research col-
leagues about starting a research program to apply functional 
magnetic resonance imaging to the prevention of genocide. We 
look for possible ideas, discussed paradigms that could be 
studied... but after a long conversation, we concluded that 
such project would be unlikely to receive proper funding. I 
asked the same question to several scientists and the same an-
swer came: no research agency will fund such project.

Instead of giving up, I started to prepare a bibliography. The 
problem was to see how functional magnetic resonance imaging 
could possibly contribute to any research on genocide preven-
tion. To solve that question, I wrote a program that is capable 
of systematically tracking cited references of articles and 
that deciphers groups from citation patterns. Last June, thanks 
to the help of a chemist friend, I was capable to complete the 
first corresponding algorithm. Using that algorithm, it is pos-
sible to monitor fluxes of influence from one domain of inter-
est to the next - I coined it zeugnostique (to bridge knowl-
edge).

My first assumption re. genocide prevention was that it could 
start with an analysis of guilt. I toggle the words "guilt" and 
"genocide", and let the program crunch the references it had 
retrieved from the social and science citation indexes.

The outcome displayed several groups but one in particular 
caught my attention. It deals with posttraumatic-stress disor-
ders (PTSD). Looking at it closely, it seemed to suggest that 
the occurrence of PTSD in children could eventually develop at 
the age of adult as the precursor of future conflicts - I am 
simplifying a little but it is the impression I had from brows-
ing this "cross-bibliography":
http://nucwww.chem.sunysb.edu/Clabadie/biblio/genocide/L4_4.html

Since then I have invited PET, fMRI, education and other spe-
cialists to start a discussion group to look closer at this is-
sue. This group called PrevGES examines the research trends to-
wards the prevention of genocide and other forms of social vio-
lence:
http://nucwww.chem.sunysb.edu/CLabadie/Prevention.html

But this group will never be able to tackle properly such ques-
tion without the help of experts or medical doctors who have 
been confronted with persons who lived through such events 
(whether responsible or victims of violence). Perhaps they 
would have other ideas of research. If you know of anyone who 
would like to discuss and eventually to co-operate with re-
search laboratories to run exploratory experiments, please sug-
gest them to join PrevGES by sending a blank e-mail to:

<PrevGES-subscribe@egroups.com>

Of course I'll be very happy to discuss this issue here if it 
is relevant to this list.

Thank you,

Christian Labadie, M.S. 
mailto:CLabadie@t-online.de

--
Send mail for the `AFRO-NETS' conference to `afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to:  `owner-afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.