Psychiatric consultant describes trauma and developmental issues at Kids in Distress Residential and Day Care Center in Southeast Florida

persistent efforts at insufflation. The maintenance of neurotic defenses and eccentric habits can be fatiguing. The children at Kids in Distress Residential and Day Care Center in Southeast Florida, called KIDS, tended to be small for their ages. As a psychiatric consultant to the Center, | often summarized an evaluation of both their physical and intellectual development as “delayed.” Looking like almost completely formed adult-like personalities, however, they were developmentally “advanced.” | heard in a child analytic seminar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Southern California that traumatized children often hurry through the dangerous developmental ambiguity of openness and flexibility to the predictable, fixed attitudes and behavior of adults. It was common to find prematurely wise young children serving as parents in chaotically dysfunctional families. In residence at the Center, set free from their pathogenic homes by social workers and family law judges, these premature caregivers lost sleep worrying about who was taking up their obligations to the sisters and brothers left behind. Trauma-induced possibility pruning was often obvious in the young refugees at Kids in Distress. Having been soaked in alcohol containing, nutritionally deficient, crack-laced amniotic fluid, young babies were then left in dirty cribs behind locked doors to cry themselves into exhausted despair. Their mothers were working the streets for drugs. The children that survived often demonstrate personality styles that are reduced in variety. They came to use a few, individualized, and stereotyped techniques for survival. Some children’s insulated detachment was_hollowly disguised as interpersonal caring. Others used driven and rigid compulsion to maintain the appearance of conscientious good citizenship. For some children, paranoid thoughts were realistic expectations. . Arriving at the Center | heard “Dr. Arnold! Dr. Arnold!’ in high-pitched screams. Several children ran up to me at once, demanding to be held. Some leaped into my arms for a hug. Trying to get and hold their visual gaze was another 32 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013532