Trauma and Grief Component Therapy for Adolescents (TGCTA)
Trauma and Grief Component Therapy for Adolescents (TGCTA) training is for professionals who provide adolescent mental health services in the schools, in clinics, and to juvenile justice-involved youth in residential treatment or on probation.
It is an evidence-based treatment developed and tested initially by Drs. Christopher Layne, William Saltzman and Robert Pynoos and adapted for justice-involved youth by Barbara Boat in collaboration with the original development team. The current manual will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.
TGCTA is a four-module training that addresses:
- Foundational knowledge and skills to enhance posttraumatic emotional, cognitive and behavioral regulation
- Group sharing and processing of trauma experiences
- Group sharing and processing of grief and loss experiences
- Resumption of adaptive developmental progression and future orientation
Because the training manual contains step-by-step instructions for implementation, it can be administered not only by trained clinicians but also by non-mental health professionals such as teachers, facility staff and coaches.
When trained in conjunction with Think Trauma, which instructs facility staff and/or probation officers about posttraumatic reactions and offers skills to manage them, TGCTA has been shown to reduce incident reports and threatening behavior by youth in several facilities while also reducing the severity of PTSD and other posttraumatic symptoms among youth.
