Spécificités du psychotraumatisme chez l’enfant et l’adolescent

Some accounts of psychotraumatic reactions date from 2000 before JC and a lot of observations of posttraumatic troubles have been reported in the course of history. Nevertheless, interest for those troubles is more recent. This concept has been created to describe adults’ troubles. It includes only a part of the aspects of child posttraumatic disorders. There have been a lot of scientific publications on this theme during the last years but few studies on young subjects until recently. Before explaining the different notions of trauma, life events, stress or risk, we are going to describe the historic specificities in child psycho trauma, its late recognition and the effective advances. We will take an interest in the specificities of the nature and the symptomatology of the trauma affecting children. The consequences of a trauma and the adaptative possibilities of the subject are different on a constantly evolving person.