The Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center at NYU Langone’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry provides training, consultation, and technical assistance for agencies who seek to implement our treatment model.

Trauma Systems Therapy is a comprehensive program designed to give agencies in the child services system (such as mental health, child welfare, schools, juvenile justice, refugee programs, and residential programs) the tools to understand the traumatized child’s problems in their full context and to implement effective interventions to address these problems, no matter how complex or challenging.

Although Trauma Systems Therapy can help any child with a history of trauma who has difficulty regulating emotion or behavioral states that may be related to the trauma, agencies most often engage us to set up a program to treat their most challenging children and families. According to the Pareto Principle, agencies typically spend 80 percent of their time and resources on the 20 percent of children and families who are most challenging and the other 20 percent of their time and resources on the other 80 percent. We believe that Trauma Systems Therapy offers something uniquely effective for the 20 percent of children and families that your agency is most worried about.

To establish a Trauma Systems Therapy program in your agency, we work with you to build a clinical team and help you build the capacity to sustain and grow your team over time. Typically, agencies form agreements with the Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center for one or two years. We are also glad to work with you to create specialized trainings for your agency.

Trauma Systems Therapy, or TST, is a treatment originally developed in the early 2000s by Glenn Saxe, MD, the director of the Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center, and by Heidi Ellis, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital, to fill a critical gap in the field of traumatic stress. Their approach was published in the book Trauma Systems Therapy for Children and Teens, published by Guilford Press.

For more information on Trauma Systems Therapy and what setting up a program in your agency entails, view our Trauma Systems Therapy brochure.