Eddie can be a real pain.
Bruce Perry, a University of Chicago child and adolescent psychiatrist, first saw Eddie in 1989, when he started consulting at Saint Joe’s. “He was bouncing off the walls,” Perry says.
After World War I doctors who treated combat veterans for shell shock noted that when the veterans were exposed to loud noises they frequently developed upset stomachs, rapid heart rates, breathlessness, tightness in the chest, and sometimes loss of bladder and bowel control. By World War II the term “shell shock” had been replaced by “battle fatigue.” In a 1945 book on the subject, R.R. Grinker and B.L. Smith wrote that the flight personnel they studied “seem to suffer from a chronic stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system. They perspire freely, are tremulous, restless and irritable, sleep poorly, and look very sick. At times these symptoms suddenly increase, especially in response to mild auditory or verbal stimuli, and the patients react as if they had received an injection of adrenalin.”
Now Perry hopes the understanding being accorded to veterans will be extended to kids like Eddie, “who so often are thought of just as little brats–or later on, little criminals.”
“The brain develops in response to the environment it’s in. I see these 13-year-old inner-city kids, and they’ve been exposed to beatings and shootings their whole lives, and all this other crap–and these kids are hostile, and doing gang signs, and don’t trust adults. I think their brains are perfect. They’ve adapted perfectly to their environment. It’s just that their environment hasn’t done right by them.”
When he consults at Saint Joe’s two mornings a week, Perry spends most of his time advising staff members how to work with the residents. The counselors and teachers appreciate his laid-back style. They say it’s easy to trust Perry’s advice, given his lab and clinical experience. What they aren’t aware of is that Perry also brings to his work firsthand knowledge of the power of a major emotional trauma.
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Perry was born and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota. When he was in fifth grade the drifts from Bismarck’s annual blizzard covered his family’s one-story house. In North Dakota, he says, “nature is so incredibly overwhelming that you’re always humbled. The dominant landscape feature out there is the sky. On clear nights there are places where you can look straight forward and see stars, and you just turn 360 degrees–you don’t have to look up at all–and in every direction you see stars. I grew up with a real sense of man as a part of the food chain, as part of a greater whole.”
