Daniel Schechter

In Geneva, his clinical research efforts continue to focus on the effects of parental violence-related traumatic stress on the parent-child relationship and child developmental outcomes in the domains of emotion and arousal regulation, together with related biomarkers, that might contribute to intergenerational cycles of violence and victimization. Schechter was appointed in 2018 as Barakett Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine where he served as Director of the research Center for Stress, Trauma, and Resilience and Medical Director of Perinatal and Early Childhood Mental Health Services. In July, 2019, he returned to Switzerland to assume medical directorship of a new ambulatory care and research program for children ages 0 to 5 years on the child and adolescent psychiatry service of the Lausanne University Hospital and is currently associate professor of psychiatry (in child and adolescent psychiatry) at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the Lausanne University.

Schechter's work has received a number of awards including: Pierre Janet and Sandor Ferenczi Scientific Paper Prizes from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (2007 and 2018 respectively), the Hayman Prize for Best Published Work Relevant to Traumatized Children or Adults (2015) and four Significant Contribution to Research Awards from the International Psychoanalytical Association (2005, 2009, 2013, 2015), as well as three Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Paper Prizes from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2010, 2015, 2017). His publication with psychologist Dominik Moser on neural activity among traumatized mothers with dissociative symptoms was awarded a Best Scientific Paper Prize by the French Psychiatric Association (2014).

Schechter served as a key member of the New York City Early Childhood Mental Health Strategic Work Group, an advisory group to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under the direction of Evelyn Blanck from 2004 to 2008. In 2005, the Workgroup published a White Paper,“Promoting the Mental Health and Healthy Development of New York’s Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers, A Call to Action,” that has been used to effectively advocate for mental health services for children from birth to age 5 across all child-serving systems in New York City and New York State. This paper was instrumental in the inclusion of infants and toddlers in the Child and Families Clinic Plus Initiative implemented by the New York State Office of Mental Health, thus officially recognized for the first time as under the responsibility for care by state licensed child and adolescent mental health clinical programs. An updated version of the White Paper was reviewed favorably in 2011 by the New York State Mental Health Commissioner's Office.

Daniel S. Schechter (born 1962 in Miami, Florida) is an American psychiatrist known for his clinical work and research on intergenerational transmission or "communication" of violent trauma and related psychopathology involving parents and very young children. His published work in this area following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York of September 11, 2001 led to a co-edited book entitled "September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds" (2003) and additional original articles with clinical psychologist Susan Coates that were translated into multiple languages and remain among the first accounts of 9/11 related loss and trauma described by mental health professionals who also experienced the attacks and their aftermath Schechter observed that separation anxiety among infants and young children who had either lost or feared loss of their caregivers triggered posttraumatic stress symptoms in the surviving caregivers. These observations validated his prior work on the adverse impact of family violence on the early parent-child relationship, formative social-emotional development and related attachment disturbances involving mutual dysregulation of emotion and arousal. This body of work on trauma and attachment has been cited by prominent authors in the attachment theory, psychological trauma, developmental psychobiology and neuroscience literatures

Funding through the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, allowed Schechter to travel to Tulane University in New Orleans, beginning in 1998, to study with infant mental health specialist Charles H. Zeanah. They have since collaborated on multiple projects and articles related to the effects of psychological trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the relationship of infants, young children, and their parents as well as related attachment disorder. This collaboration along with involvement as a Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families Solnit Fellow (1999–2001), encouraged Schechter to pursue further research training in developmental neuroscience through a NIH-funded research fellowship in developmental psychobiology with Myron Hofer and Michael Myers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In 2003, Schechter received an NIMH Research Career Award to fund the project "Maternal Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Interactive Behavior with Very Young Children" which was completed in 2008. In that same year, Schechter was recruited to Geneva, Switzerland to become the Director of Pediatric Consult-Liaison and Parent-Child Research in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Geneva Hospitals. And he is currently Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry within the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva.

During his work as director of infant mental health services at the Columbia University Medical Center (1998–2008), Schechter found that the large majority of inner-city mothers who were requesting consultation for their infants and young children for reasons of behavioral difficulties had histories of childhood maltreatment and/or family violence victimization and exposure, often with related psychiatric sequelae (i.e. PTSD, major depression, dissociation, and personality disorder). He further observed that many of these traumatized mothers, despite their best intentions, not only had great difficulty in "reading" and tolerating their infants' distress, but that they also had a tendency to misattribute their children's intentions and personality characteristics. As a result, the child, in an effort to maintain an attachment with the traumatized parent, would conform to these misattributions and/or attempt to join the parent's hypervigilant mental state, leading to a traumatically skewed intersubjectivity Children of these traumatized mothers also show increased PTSD symptoms, externalizing symptoms and attachment disturbances that are mediated by maternal PTSD severity.