ABSTRACT
Surveys demonstrate at least 50% of prisoners have suffered the loss of a family member or close friend to a violent death, and, though underserved, are vulnerable to its emotional effects. Salloum developed a 10-session, closed group, school-based intervention for intraurban youth and demonstrated significant improvement in measures of trauma distress and depression. The goals of the study were exploratory to measure the prevalence of violent dying exposure within a population of incarcerated youth and to measure the associated effects of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, drug and alcohol dependence, and death imagery through reliable, self-report testing before and after a 10-session group intervention. The Impact of Events Scale-Revised is comprised of self-report measures divided into Avoidance and Intrusion subscales. Perhaps the very high levels of substance abuse in these youth initially masks the experience of traumatic grief, which became more manifest with our intervention that encouraged exposure to the death imagery without access to substances.
