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AACAP Honors Hero Who Saved Children From Nazis

Jane Edgerton is project manager in APA's Office of Children's Affairs.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry held its annual meeting in San Diego this year. Childhood trauma figured prominently in the scientific program.

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Sir Nicholas Winton was honored at the AACAP meeting for rescuing 669 Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939. He is shown above with one of the children and below at his home in England. He is now 93 years old. Gelman Educational Foundation

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More than 3,400 child and adolescent psychiatrists and guests attended the 53^rd annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) in October in San Diego. Program sessions presented cutting-edge information on diagnosis, pharmacological and psychosocial treatments, neuroimaging, and genetics.

The Asociacion Mexicana de Psiquiatria Infantil was a special participant in the meeting. That association is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and its president, Jesus del Bosque Garza, M.D., thanked AACAP for its recognition of this event.

Robert Pynoos, M.D., presented a special lecture at the karl Menninger, M.D., plenary about the legacy of child traumatic stress and the unmet need for treatment. He noted the success of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) program in postwar Bosnia in helping children recover from the trauma they experienced. He also said that community violence in the United States has led to an epidemic of posttraumatic stress disorder, creating a huge and still unanswered need for psychological first aid.

Also at the Menninger plenary, a tribute was given for Robert Harmon, M.D., chair of the meeting's program committee, who died unexpectedly in February.

Sir Nicholas Winton received the 2006 Catcher in the Rye Humanitarian of the Year Award for his rescue of hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939. On a visit to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1938, in the days leading up to the Nazi invasion, Winton became fearful for the fate of the Jewish children. For more than nine months, he raised money and organized transportation to England and Sweden for 669 children and arranged their placement with foster families. Many of the survivors call themselves "Winton's Children" and credit him for their survival.

Winton's efforts went unknown for 50 years until his wife discovered lists of the children's names and letters from the parents in the couple's attic. In 2002 his heroism reached a wider audience with the release of the movie "The Power of Good: Saving Children in 1939." Rudolph Meisel and Paul Glasner, two of the children he saved, answered questions after the movie was shown at the meeting the following day.

Here are other highlights of the AACAP meeting:

•John Schowalter, M.D., presented the Joseph Noshpitz Memorial History Lecture titled "The Wizard of Oz revealed" and related his observations of the Oz books he has loved since childhood. The story is considered to be one of America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairy tales.

Dorothy, who is remembered often as the actress Judy Garland in ruby slippers, was the first feminist and an orphan who lived on a farm in Kansas, according to Schowalter. L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz stories, was an actor and musician who began writing children's books in the 1890s. Baum was a superb storyteller, but it was the movie, released in 1939, that kept the Oz books in publication.

One of the major differences in the book and movie, he continued, is the setting for the story. In the book a magical trip leading to a return to home is the center of the story, but in the movie all these adventures occur in a dream. In both, however, the only law of Oz is to behave yourself. The story continues to be interpreted in different ways and remains a popular and fascinating tale to this day. (Google identifies about 2.5 million sites for the Wizard of Oz.)

•As noted earlier, several presentations focused on childhood trauma and its treatments. Kimberly Hoagwood, Ph.D., led a symposium on responses to the September 11, 2001, tragedy in New York. Sandra Kaplan, M.D., described the beginning of the Child and Adolescent Trauma Treatment and Services Consortium (CATS). In October 2001, Peter Jensen, M.D., Robert Pynoos, M.D., William Saltzman, Ph.D., Sandra Kaplan, M.D., Reese Abright, M.D., Juliet Vogel, Ph.D., and Phil Saigh, Ph.D., met to develop principles for designing interventions aimed at children who had been affected by the 9/11 events. The thought was to use schools as the primary location for a variety of services because, in addition to needing help for mental health problems, the children needed assistance on school functioning and relationships with peers. The program that resulted, CATS, began about a year after the event.

James Rodriguez, Ph.D., related the efforts it took to keep the children in the program. Intensive work with the children and parents established collaborative working alliances. Six sites were used for school-based clinics; 445 students were initially evaluated, and 422 took part in the study.

Jeffrey Newcorn, M.D., commented on some of the reasons that assessing the program's effectiveness was difficult: the CATS program began a year after 9/11, there were ethical concerns that compromised the design of the research, and finding a control group for comparison purposes was difficult.

Raul Silva, M.D., of NYU Medical Center watched the 9/11 events unfold from his office at Bellvue Hospital. Organizing a public health response immediately after the terrorist attacks was difficult, he said. All mental health responders involved in the response had to find ways to collaborate, obtain funding, and agree to be flexible and adaptive under difficult and shifting conditions. Only when such collaboration was accomplished could treatment programs begin in earnest.

•AACAP members discussed four draft practice parameters (practice guidelines): Psychiatric Assessment and Management of Physically Ill Children and Adolescents, Telepsychiatry With Children and Adolescents, Assessment and Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders, and the Use of Antipsychotic Medications in Children and Adolescents. AACAP members can access these drafts at <www.aacap.org> and submit comments on them by January 26, 2007.

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