Daniel Schechter

Daniel S. Schechter (born 1962 in Miami, Florida) is an American and Swiss 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.

[1][2][3] 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) [4] 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[5][6][7][8] 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.

His earliest research examined the nature of mother-daughter relationships in the context of male-perpetrated child sexual abuse [18] as well as trauma-related culture-bound syndromes in an inner-city Caribbean Hispanic community.

[19] 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.

[23] In Geneva, his clinical research efforts [24] focused 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.

[27] In July, 2019, he returned to Switzerland to assume medical directorship together with psychologist Josée Despars of a newly created parent-child ambulatory care program for ages 0-5 "PAPILLON" within the child and adolescent psychiatry service (SUPEA) of the Lausanne University Hospital.

[42][43] Schechter and colleagues developed an experimental paradigm informed by attachment theory called the Clinician Assisted Videofeedback Exposure Sessions (CAVES) to test whether mothers could "change their mind" about their young children if helped to watch video-excerpts of play, separation and similarly stressful moments in the presence of a clinician who asks the mother to think about what she (and her child) might be thinking and feeling at the time of the excerpt and at the moment of videofeedback.