Harris Foundation Grant Will Expand Mental Health Program for Infants Offered by BIU and Geha Infant Clinics in Israel

May 20, 2009, Chicago, IL A $500,000 grant from the Chicago-based Irving Harris Foundation will fund a new program at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) and the Geha Infant Clinic to expand the number of child clinical psychologist interns being trained in Israel.

In making the announcement, Phyllis Glink, executive director of the Harris Foundation, said, “The Foundation’s vision is to greatly increase the number of well-trained clinicians with the skills to provide evidence-based infant mental health treatment and services to at-risk families with very young children who have been exposed to violence or who have experienced traumatic stress. We are excited by Bar-Ilan’s plans to create a multi-disciplinary fellowship program for clinical psychologists who are dedicated to working with these families. This is critical work and our grant will begin to help Israel build an infrastructure of trained clinicians with the skills to effectively intervene early in the lives of children who are suffering and enable them to reach their potential.”

These funds will launch Israel’s first training program for psychologists during their internship, which will boost the number of young clinicians specializing in infant mental health. More specialists in this area are particularly needed to help young children exposed to violence in Israel’s border cities such as Sderot in the western Negev.

This program is directed jointly by Prof. Ruth Feldman, of the Psychology Department and the Gonda Brain Sciences Center at Bar-Ilan University, and Dr. Miri Keren, director of the community-based infant mental health clinic at Geha. The Israeli Ministry of Health is licensing this program, which will be conducted at both the in-house clinic at BIU’s Psychology Department and at the Geha Infant Clinic. The Foundation’s funding will enable the Geha Infant Clinic to deal with severe cases of neglect and abuse.

“At the Bar-Ilan in-house clinic, we will use these funds to help younger children and mothers with post-partum depression. Our clinic will be able to expand its parent-child evaluations, which include observation techniques we created that are now being used worldwide. We analyze the temperaments of the family members, assess the risks of the home environment for the child, and provide a psychological and cognizant diagnosis that includes non-verbal methods of assessment,” said Feldman.

Dr. Keren, president-elect of the World Association for Infant Mental Heath, said, “Based on the knowledge of the impact of negative early care giving experiences on the brain development in the first years of life, and consequently, of the importance of early detection and early psychiatric treatment, training teams become a must. Without adequate trained child clinical psychologists specifically focused on infant psychopathology and parent-infant psychotherapies, the theoretical knowledge will stay in the university libraries…and new generations of lifespan psychopathology will grow out of our very stressful societies.”

According to Feldman, the interns will be asked upon their graduation from the program to provide care for children at risk in periphery towns such as Sderot.

In addition to this new grant, the Harris Foundation has been a long-time supporter of early childhood development programs developed at Prof. Pnina Klein, director of the I.B. Harris Program for Infants, Toddlers and Families in Israel at Bar-Ilan University.

Over the years, the Harris Foundation has provided approximately $3 million to support Prof. Klein’s work, which includes her groundbreaking research and analysis to improve adult-child interactions through observation and intervention techniques. In Israel, she is working with the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and other organizations to develop a national program for training early childhood professionals and caregivers.

Prof. Klein’s development of the More Intelligent and Sensitive Child Program (known as MISC) designed to enhance child development has been introduced by UNICEF and other aid organizations in many countries including Sri Lanka, Norway, Indonesia, Sweden, Singapore, Ethiopia, Belgium, England and the United States. The US National Institute of Mental Health is using the basic MISC approach developed by Prof. Klein for treatment of HIV-infected infants and toddlers in Africa to supplement medical treatment.

Due to the ongoing rocket attacks in Sderot, a Harris Sderot project at Bar-Ilan University was established in June 2008. According to Prof. Klein, the critical need for a project to specifically help younger children became even more apparent when out of 331 toddlers studied by the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psycho-Trauma, 40.8% were diagnosed with either full or partial Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The Harris Sderot project team discovered that existing intervention focused primarily on children three years old and up. Prof. Klein says, “The Harris team found that very young children in Sderot were jeopardized both because of the ongoing traumatic life situations in Sderot and because of the low quality of care they received in daycare.”

An intervention to help young children in Sderot was carried out by both Harris trainees and professionals. In addition, monthly workshops were held at BIU with the Sderot team. Prof. Klein says, “This project has evolved into an interdisciplinary intervention model for families and caregivers of infants and young children living under conditions of ongoing trauma.”

Mark Medin, executive vice president & CEO of American Friends of Bar-Ilan University, says, “The Harris Foundation is to be commended for its generous support of both Professors Klein and Feldman, as well as for its tremendous contributions to improving the mental health of children in Israel and worldwide.”

To learn more about the programs the Harris Program at BIU, call Les Goldstein, Midwest Regional Director of AFBIU, at 248-540-8900 or email les.goldstein@afbiu.org.