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.Mayer, KM. (December 10, 2001). Der Terror bleibt in den Menschen (The terror lingers...). Focus, GermanyDavaris, S. (March 18, 2011). Mon enfant peut-il me rendre fou (Can my child drive me crazy?). Tribune de Genève, Switzerland. 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) Coates SW, Rosenthal J, Schechter DS — Eds. (2003). September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds. New York: Taylor and Francis, Inc. 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 aftermathSchechter DS, Coates SW, First E (2002). Observations of acute reactions of young children and their families to the World Trade Center attacks. Journal of ZERO-TO-THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, 22(3), 9-13.Schechter DS, Coates SW, First F (2003). Beobachtungen von akuten Reaktionen kleiner Kinder und ihrer Familien auf die Anschläge auf das World Trade Center. In T. Auchter, C. Buettner, U. Schultz-Venrath, H.-J. Wirth (Eds.): Der 11. September. Psychoanalytische, psychosoziale und psychohistorische Analysen von Terror und Trauma. Giessen, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag. pp. 268-280 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.Schechter DS, Zygmunt A, Coates SW, Davies M, Trabka KA, McCaw J, Kolodji A., Robinson JL (2007). Caregiver traumatization adversely impacts young children’s mental representations of self and others. Attachment & Human Development, 9(3), 187-20.Schechter DS, Coates, SW, Kaminer T, Coots T, Zeanah CH, Davies M, Schonfield IS, Marshall RD, Liebowitz MR Trabka KA, McCaw J, Myers MM (2008). Distorted maternal mental representations and atypical behavior in a clinical sample of violence-exposed mothers and their toddlers. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 9(2), 123-149.Schechter DS, Willheim E (2009). Disturbances of attachment and parental psychopathology in early childhood. Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Issue. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinics of North America, 18(3), 665-687. 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 Fonagy P, Gergely G, Target M (2007). The parent-infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self. Journal of Child Psychology, 3, 288-328.van IJzendoorn M, Bakermans MJ (2008). DRD4 7-repeat polymorphism moderates the association between maternal unresolved loss or trauma and infant disorganization. Attachment and Human Development, 8(4), 291-307.Charuvastra A, Cloitre M (2008). Social bonds and posttraumatic stress disorder. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 301-328.Mills-Koonce WR, Propper C, Gariepy JL, Barnett M, Moore GA, Calkins S, Cox MJ (2009). Psychophysiological correlates of parenting behavior in mothers of young children. Developmental Psychobiology, 51(8),650-61.Hibel LC, Granger DA, Blair C, Cox MJ (2009). Intimate partner violence moderates the association between mother–infant adrenocortical activity across an emotional challenge. Journal of Family Psychology, 23(5), 615-625.Swain JE, Konrath S, Dayton CJ, Finegood ED, Ho SS. (2013. Toward a neuroscience of interactive parent-infant dyad empathy. Behav Brain Sci. 2013 Aug;36(4):438-9.
Career Following studies in music and French literature (Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Columbia College (B.A.), and Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (M.A.), Schechter then completed his medical training at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. His earliest research examined the nature of mother-daughter relationships in the context of male-perpetrated child sexual abuse Schechter DS, Brunelli SA, Cunningham N, Brown J, Baca P (2002). Mother-daughter relationships and child sexual abuse: A pilot study of 35 mothers and daughters (ages 1-9 years). Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 66(1), 39-60. as well as trauma-related culture-bound syndromes in an inner-city Caribbean Hispanic community.Schechter DS, Marshall RD, Salman E, Goetz D, Davies SO, Liebowitz MR (2000). Ataque de nervios and childhood trauma history: An association? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 13:3, 529-534.
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 subsequently collaborated on several 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.Schechter DS, Zeanah CH, Myers MM, Brunelli SA, Liebowitz MR, Marshall RD, Coates SW, Trabka KT, Baca P, Hofer MA (2004). Psychobiological dysregulation in violence-exposed mothers: Salivary cortisol of mothers with very young children pre- and post-separation stress. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic,68(4), 319-337.Schechter DS, Willheim E (2009). The Effects of Violent Experience and Maltreatment on Infants and Young Children. In CH Zeanah (Ed.). Handbook of Infant Mental Health—3rd Edition. New York: Guilford Press, Inc., pp. 197-213. 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. He served as Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry within the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva from 2012 to 2022.
In Geneva, his clinical research efforts 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.Schechter, D., Rusconi Serpa, S (2011). Applying relevant developmental neuroscience towards interventions that better target intergenerational transmission of violent trauma. The Signal: Newsletter of the World Association of Infant Mental Health, 19(3), 9-16. 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 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. There, he also co-directs with Dr. Mathilde Morisod the SUPEA Perinatal and Early Childhood Training and Research Group "SPECTRE". He is currently a tenured 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 multiple Significant Contribution to Research Awards from the International Psychoanalytical Association (2005, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2021, 2023), as well as three Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Paper Prizes from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2010, 2015, 2017). His publications with psychologist Dominik Moser and neuroscientist Virginie Pointet were awarded Best Scientific Paper Prizes by the French Psychiatric Association (2014, 2019) and the French Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2024).Moser DA, Aue T, Wang Z, Rusconi-Serpa S, Favez N., Peterson BS, Schechter DS (2014). Comorbid dissociation dampens limbic activation in violence-exposed mothers with PTSD who are exposed to video-clips of their child during separation. Stress. 16(5):493-502. He has additionally received the John J. Weber Research Prize from Columbia University and the Kernberg Scientific Achievement Award from Cornell University Departments of Psychiatry respectively
Helping traumatized parents "change their minds about their young children"