Customer Reviews

The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing

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Thank you, Dr. Perry! Finally, what foster and adoptive parents knew all along...Love does heal these traumatized children! As a former foster parent, an adoptive and birth parent, and a child and family therapist, I am overjoyed to see these stories in print. It is a difficult task to find help and have professionals actually understand that this child sees the world differently for a neurodevelopmental reason, and not just because they are oppositional. Dr. Perry has shared this information in a way that anyone who reads it will think differently, with his incredible storytelling. It is so important for children with prenatal and postnatal trauma to be understood and to matter. Neurodevelopmental principles are not that difficult to put into place at home, school, or in the community. Children must experience success on a daily basis, at their individual neurodevelopmental pace. I have seen it work in many children.

Dr. Perry puts it very simple when he stated in this book:

"For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that "unless you love yourself, no one else will love you." Women were told that they didn't need men, and vice versa. People without any relationships were believed to be as healthy as those who had many. These ideas contradict the fundamental biology of human species: we are social mammals and could never have survived without deeply interconnected and interdependent human contact. The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation."

This book is a must read for anyone working with traumatized children, raising healthy children, or just raising each other!

Connie Sirnio, MSW, LCSW
Child and Family Therapist
PsyD Learner in Clinical Psychology
Coos Bay, Oregon

I am the co-author of this book. We want everyone to buy it but for some reason, Amazon sells the Kindle version at a "hardcover" price about $5 more than the "paperback" price even though the text of both editions is exactly the same. It is not clear why this is and we are trying to have it corrected: if this is inappropriate for a review, please delete it but fix the problem!

We don't want you to feel ripped off, so please buy either the real paperback, the real hardcover or the cheaper Kindle version (click to it by starting from the page for the paperback, not the hardcover) and consider donating the extra $5 to the child-related charity of your choice.

I am a mental health counseling student and am so happy that I ordered this book. The author has left in all the needed details to help understand the complexities of trauma on the brain and the later affects to a child's or adult's life. You may even discover something about your own confused background in the process. Once I picked up the book it was hard to put down even though I have SO much other required reading. This should be a required book because of the common sense approach. I learned a lot. I hope Dr Perry and Ms Szalavitz write more psychiatric books. The case choices were interesting and very detailed. Thank you for taking the extra time to get all the details in there. I know how hard it is to go the extra distance to make the reading more informative and accurate.

The book lives up to its fascinating title. Perry has worked for years with traumatized and neglected children and his take on dealing with them is based on research showing how the brain develops and the impact of neglect and abuse on it. In other words, if a child is abused or neglected in the first year of life (approximately), physical changes take place in the brain or rather, neurological connections that should be made, are not. (This is a vast simplification.) So as a child gets older and begins exhibiting antisocial behaviors that land him or her in special classes or even mental hospitals, it is not because he or she prefers to act this way but because the child's brain is unable to function in a way that enables him or her to become socialized. Perry, having done a great deal of research on this subject himself, spits in the eye of a lot of "accepted" practices when it comes to children's mental health. I'm always interested to read views that oppose the generally accepted norms. My daughter loaned me this book which she is reading as part of her Ph.D. program in pre- and postnatal psychology. It certainly fits right in with her assertion that we need to pay much more attention to what is happening in the first year of life (and before), not only because the child's personality is being formed, but because his brain is as well (and perhaps this is the same thing). The stories in this book are heart wrenching, but Perry does show that there are ways to help or at the very least, understand.

I have been a childrens mental health therapist, specializing in childhood trauma, for over 20 years. I have taken innumerable classes and read countless (mostly difficult to wade through) books. This is the single best "text" on development, trauma and intervention that I have ever read. Dr. Perry communicates well and makes his ideas clear and understandable. He is remarkabley down to earth and his compassion and humanity shine through. I am recommending it to many who are not in this field but are interested in children and how we can best meet there needs.

I have used Bruce Perry's on-line materials in my university classes for years. (They can be accessed at [...].) Now, he and his co-author have created the single best book about reaching traumatized children that I can imagine reading. What I admire most is the way he ties the neurophysiological consequences of trauma to the intensive and loving treatment that helps to heal those traumas. Rising above all the recent scary stories about psychiatric medications for children, Perry shows that effective treatment requires both appropriate medication and structured human interaction. All children go through trying times at some point or another. The insights from this book generalize from the cases of profoundly traumatized children that he reports to improve our understanding of children in general. I recommend that foster parents, in particular, read this book for guidance in coping with the consequences of early childhood in dysfunctional families.

This truly amazing and beautifully written book provides an eye-opening, heart-felt, and mind-nourishing look at the effects that trauma has on the brain, bodies, lives, and souls of children, and offers an approach to helping heal the tragic wounds. Bruce Perry holds the rare talent of being able to integrate his intellectual gifts and academic research with his human intuition and profound compassion. Although he leads the way in the neurobiological research on childhood trauma, his most important discovery transcends the scientific realm and originates in the heart: "Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love." Helping children heal from trauma requires providing them a safe, loving, respectful, and accepting environment. Only from within this secure and loving space can the trauma to their brains and the wounds to their souls begin to heal.

Assisted by a talented science writer, child psychiatrist Bruce Perry presents a series of heartbreaking stories of children severely damaged by trauma. But that's only one side of this remarkable book. The other side is how many of these profoundly damaged children were assisted to heal.

Perry explains his "neurosequential" approach that sequentially targets brain regions left undeveloped by abuse or neglect. He presents compelling cases to illustrate how the child's age at the time of the abuse or neglect will determine the gaps in neurological development and how his interventions sequentially target those developmental gaps. For children whose brains were stalled out in infancy, for example, therapy may start with healing touch or rhythm before moving on to higher brain activities.

The focus, always, is on the child's humanity. Perry explains the importance of listening and letting the child set the pace. He warns of the damage caused by well-intentioned but poorly trained therapists who push children to open up, or who administer punitive interventions in the guise of treatment. Healing is not about a specific technique administered in cookbook fashion but, rather, about love, and restoring shattered human connections.

This is an enlightening and heartening book and a real page-turner to boot. The neurological underpinnings of the trauma theory are presented in clear English accessible to anyone who can read. If you're a mental health professional, psychologist, or psychiatrist, you'll love this book. If you're a parent or a teacher, it's also for you. Whoever you are, it's for you. I guarantee you will be engaged and inspired.

The stories in this book are heart-wrenching, but to people who've dealt with traumatized children the scenarios and the aftermath are familiar. What is truly remarkable about Dr. Perry's work is that he uses each case he describes as an opportunity to explain how the developing brain is affected by trauma and how healing can be informed by this knowledge. Unlike many other books in this genre, this is no "great therapist cures poor abused children" book. Dr. Perry is modest about his own contributions, and rightly emphasizes the role that parents, extended family, and community must play in helping to heal traumatized kids as well is preventing trauma from occurring in the first place.

As the parent of a child with PTSD, I've read extensively on the subject. I'd really have liked it if Dr. Perry could have included a recipe for cure in the book, but of course that's just my wishful thinking, not a realistic hope. What he does give for parents who are looking for help is guidelines and guidance for finding the right kind of help, not just from therapy but from the larger world. What I learned from this book will definitely contribute to my ongoing work to help my daughter find her way out of the nightmare that her past put her in.

This book is an excellent read. It is engaging and jam packed with useful information but written in a very simple, non-jargon, and often narrative format. Dr. Perry provides many useful examples to illustrate the neuroscience and endcrinology behind both dissociative and hyper-arousal responses that frequently occur for children exposed to trauma. I definitely felt like I learned things that I could immediately apply to my practice as a child protective worker - but I was able to learn without the strain of trying to understand what the author was saying. Dr. Perry makes neuroscience accessible to all people in this book.