The Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center at NYU Langone’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers training, consultation, and technical assistance in providing Trauma Systems Therapy, or TST, a treatment originally developed in the early 2000s by Glenn Saxe, MD, and Heidi Ellis, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital, to fill a critical gap in the field of traumatic stress.

To be effective, interventions must fully address the many contextual factors that lead to a child’s expression of traumatic stress. These contextual factors may be found within the child’s family, school, peer group, or neighborhood—any setting in which a child lives, learns, and plays. Contextual factors drive traumatic stress reactions, because they serve as reminders of traumatic events the child has experienced.

As a strategic approach to intervention, TST provides tools to determine the contextual factors that influence a child’s traumatic stress reactions and the means to effectively address these factors. The intervention is directed toward helping the child become less reactive to these contextual factors and is fully described in the book, Trauma Systems Therapy for Children and Teens (Saxe, Ellis, Brown, 2016). Faculty at our center teach healthcare agencies and providers to successfully implement this intervention model in different organizational settings.

Healthcare providers often work with the same children and families, but in an uncoordinated way that may lead to ineffective care. TST includes an organizational framework that supports integrated, coordinated care between different providers, as well as guidance for agencies to implement this model.

We help our clients develop TST organizational plans to assemble the multidisciplinary team of psychotherapists, home-based providers, psychiatrists, psychopharmacologists, and legal advocates needed to deliver TST. This planning process starts by examining what interventions and services that are already provided within a given setting or region. We then work with our clients to create a team of providers to implement the TST model. Often healthcare agencies and providers within specific regions can work together to apply TST in a coordinated manner, so that their interventions and services can effectively address the complex needs of the traumatized children and families in their care.

We have helped successfully establish TST programs in 16 states, Canada, and Singapore. Our clients include healthcare providers from child welfare settings including foster care and prevention services, as well as in outpatient and refugee mental health, residential care, school-based, and substance abuse care settings.

Contact Us

For more information about the Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center, to set up a consultation, or receive technical assistance, please contact Katherine Barral at katherine.barral@nyulangone.org.