A Reveiw of Bruce Perry’s Latest Book

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook
Authors: Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz
New York: Basic Books 2007.

In this elegantly and sensitively written book, Dr. Bruce Perry does for child psychiatry what Oliver Sacks has done for neurology*.  Perry and his co-author make accessible to the general reader both the science and the art of working as a mental health therapist with some of the most vulnerable members of our societies. The cases let us enter not only the lives of the terribly damaged children that are described, but also the detailed clinical thinking of someone whose deep-seated humanity has allowed him to make the very best use of the most up-to-date brain science, to which he has also contributed. As such it is as much intellectual history as it is case-study, and all the stronger for it.

In the pages of this book, you will meet the children brain-washed by David Korech at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas. You will meet a boy whose childless caregiver gave him what he believed was sufficient: the same care as he gave his dogs. You will meet a family whose one son is a well-adjusted contributor to society and the other a brutal murderer and rapist. Why the difference? Because at a crucial stage of the second son’s life, he was left alone for long periods of the day by parents who did not understand that food, clothing and warmth are not enough. Another story tells of a young girl whose failure to thrive turned out to be because her poorly raised mother did not know how to give the love and touch that she herself had never had.

These stories and many others in the book are stories of terrible crimes against children, most of them born of ignorance rather than malice. And it would be easy to take a moral high-ground and suggest that these terrible deeds are a product of an American society that has little in common with our own. However, our rates of child abuse and neglect in New Zealand – 9 children each year killed by a caregiver, 193 children hospitalized in 2006 with deliberately inflicted injuries, 5,077 children in care – suggest no cause for complacency. The stories in this book could just as easily have been New Zealand stories, and the responses we need to make to them need to be equally sophisticated and well informed by neuroscience as Dr. Perry’s.

Reading this book, I discovered all over again why Dr. Perry is a world leader in child psychiatry and neuroscience. I found it reinforced the importance of the work we do in Brainwave Trust. And I felt thankful anew that we have been so lucky to have Dr. Perry work directly with us in New Zealand. If anyone doubts the importance of the Brainwave Trust, they need only read this wonderful book.

Reveiwed by Susan Foster-Cohen, Ph.D.
Brainwave Presenter Christchurch 

* ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’, and other volumes