special report: disaster sessions
sessions d isaster The
As climate-fueled disasters increase, more North Bay mental health providers are specializing in trauma By Vicki Larson J ennifer Silverstein had a thriving therapy business helping at-risk foster children recover from trauma when she and her family were forced to flee their home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, at the time the most destructive wildfire in California history. Thankfully, her Windsor house was spared, but in the aftermath Silverstein started getting calls from non-foster home parents also impacted by the fire—which destroyed more than 5,600 structures and killed 22 people—desperate to help their traumatized children make sense of what happened. It was transformative for her. “I thought it was going to be a temporary shift in my clientele, but it didn’t really go away for years because we had other fires and we had a lot of smoke, and all of those would provoke those trauma symptoms again,” she says. “At that time, I noticed a lot of my colleagues and I began having big wait lists. We had no space. Over the years, it’s not gotten better, it’s gotten worse.”
May 2025 May 2025
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