WHAT IS CHILDREN’S ACCELERATED TRAUMA TECHNIQUE?
CATT
Children’s Accelerated Trauma Techniques (CATT) is a specialist therapy developed for children and young people from ages four and up. It gives children and young people the power to express what happened to them through play and creativity. Through this process, within the context of an holistic intervention involving caregivers and the wider community, children are able to resolve their memories as part of a story where a period of traumatic events concludes with their cessation. This allows memories to be recalled without being re-experienced.
CATT works fast and enables children to safely reprocess their traumatic memories, and then get back to normal life with increased resilience. CATT is fully aligned with UK NICE guidelines and World Health Organisation recommendations for treating PTSD in children.
CATT was developed by child therapist and psychologist Dr Carlotta Raby, while she worked with traumatised children in the UK and Rwanda. It is holistic, paying attention to the needs and circumstances of the child, as well as focusing on treating the symptoms of PTSD.
CATT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT
CATT can be taught outside the UK to people without clinical backgrounds. Schoolteachers, social workers and refugees with play skills have been able to learn the technique and apply it successfully with traumatised children. This makes CATT particularly suitable for deployment after war, disaster, state failure and displaced populations and in areas with missing or underdeveloped mental health infrastructure, as it does not rely on there being significant numbers of clinicians available to the population. In other words, this makes CATT particularly suitable for deployment in conditions where large numbers of children with PTSD are often found.