About the van der Kolk Center
Justice Resource Institute is dedicated to addressing the most confounding challenges of both the human services and educational systems and the persons and families these systems were created to serve. Justice Resource Institute pursues the social justice inherent in opening doors to opportunity and independence. Although our range of services is as varied as those we serve, our approach is uniformly characterized by compassionate support, innovation, and community leadership. JRI works in partnership with individuals, families, communities and government to address their shared challenges in a comprehensive, coordinated, systematic, and effective manner. JRI seeks new knowledge and improved evidence-based practice, in research and in the field, in order to inform our continuous search for excellence in service.
The Trauma Center is a program of Justice Resource Institute (JRI). The Executive Director of the Trauma Center is Joseph Spinazzola, Ph.D., and the Medical Director and Founder of the Trauma Center is Bessel van der Kolk, MD, who is an internationally recognized leader in the field of psychological trauma. The Trauma Center provides comprehensive services to traumatized children and adults and their families.
The van der Kolk Center is a residential program of JRI and The Trauma Center that provides around the clock safety and support as well as state of the art educational, medical, therapeutic, and clinical services as well as comprehensive trauma specific assessments and interventions to our students.
These state of the art practices are only possible because of the cutting edge work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and his colleagues at the Trauma Center. In an effort to acknowledge his work and the development of this level of programming, JRI named this residental program in his honor, as the van der Kolk Center Glenhaven Academy.
About Dr. Bessel van der KolkBessel A. van der Kolk M.D. has been active as a clinician, researcher and teacher in the area of posttraumatic stress and related phenomena since the 1970s. His work integrates developmental, biological, psychodynamic and interpersonal aspects of the impact of trauma and its treatment. His book Psychological Trauma was the first integrative text on the subject, painting the far ranging impact of trauma on the entire person and the range of therapeutic issues which need to be addressed for recovery.
Dr. van der Kolk and his various collaborators have published extensively on the impact of trauma on development, such as dissociative problems, borderline personality and self-mutilation, cognitive development in traumatized children and adults, and the psychobiology of trauma. He was co-principal investigator of the DSM IV Field Trials for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His current research is on how trauma affects memory processes and brain imaging studies of PTSD.
Dr. van der Kolk is past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and Medical Director of the Trauma Center at HRI Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has taught at universities and hospitals across the United States and around the world, including Europe, Africa, Russia, Australia, Israel, and China. His latest book, co-edited with Alexander McFarlane and Lars Weisaeth, explores what we have learned in the past twenty years of the re-discovery of the role of trauma in psychiatric illness. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society was published by Guilford Press in May, 1996.
