WestCoast Children’s Clinic is releasing a research study, Uncovering Trauma At a Community Clinic: Links to Mental Health Needs, the first in a three-part series on youth mental health. In this first paper, also published by the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, we discuss how patterns of trauma exposures among youth result in distinct mental health needs. 

For the youth WestCoast serves, we found that the impact of community violence on mental health is just as profound as child abuse and neglect: Youth who experience community violence exposure have the highest level of mental health needs. Additionally, youth that experience a single traumatic event often need as much intensive support as those that have experienced more than one trauma. As such, counting traumas is not as helpful as understanding the whole of the child’s experience when providing support. 

Taken together, our findings reiterate the importance of policy and community-level interventions that address poverty, racism and other environmental factors that deeply impact children and families’ lives.  

To read more about our findings and their implications, read the full paper here.

Thank you to the Zellerbach Family Foundation and our individual donors for supporting WestCoast’s research.