When children have an experience that makes them believe their lives or the lives of someone they love are threatened, they’re experiencing trauma. Once that experience has ended, many of these children respond well to talk therapy as a means of processing the trauma, but not all of them. To find ways to help the remaining 20% of traumatized teens, Amy Garrett, Ph.D. is studying the “neural mechanisms of symptom improvement during psychotherapy for adolescents who have symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”
“In other words,” Garret said, “We want to know, how does brain function change when young people receive successful therapy for trauma?”
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Director, Adolescent Trauma Research Program
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Garrett is an associate professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Radiology at UT Health San Antonio. Every six weeks over 18 weeks of trauma therapy, she and her team give MRIs to a group of San Antonio teens who’ve experienced trauma.
“The reason we do this is because healing from trauma is a gradual series of steps,” Garrett said, “and we think that the brain processes might also be a series of different steps that require different changes in the brain at different times.”
That could help identify critical time points in therapy that predict successful outcomes, Garrett said. “If we can understand how the brain changes during successful therapy, we can use that information to personalize treatments for the teens who don’t respond to it.”
Garrett began her career in aerospace engineering but quickly realized that she was far more interested in the interior lives of people than she was in the inner workings of airplanes. She then got a Ph.D. in neuroscience and began studying human emotion and the brain, and how the brain responds to stress.
“It turns out that neuroimaging is really a great way to combine my technical skills with, and still ask questions about, human feelings and thoughts and how the brain changes over time,” Garrett said.
She loves it.
“Every day, I really feel like we're making a difference in the lives of families, of children, adolescents, and families,” Garrett said, “and that's just so rewarding.”
If you are or know a teen who has experienced trauma and would be interested in participating in this study, contact UT Health San Antonio here.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
