Research in minors with a recent history of trauma—A bold venture?

Little research has been performed so far on the mental health state of grieving and recently traumatized children. “The Buoy” (“Die Boje”), a low threshold ambulatory provides non-bureaucratic help and short time psychotherapy to children and adolescents in need of professional support at no charge and treats about 1400 minors per year. Whilst performing a study on these patients with special regard to their social network, we found the process of recruitment to be extraordinarily challenging. Only about 25% of the eligible patients could be recruited successfully within during the period of one year. In this paper we try to examine the barriers we had to overcome in gaining access to the sensitive field of grieving and traumatized children and adolescents who rely on low threshold psychotherapeutic and neuropsychiatric support and analyze the factors leading to the high number of dropouts. In addition, the consequences for our results will be discussed.