Impact of new traumatic or stressful life events on pre-existing PTSD in traumatized refugees : results of a longitudinal study

Background: A significant proportion of trauma survivors experience an additional critical life event in the aftermath. These renewed experiences of traumatic and stressful life events may lead to an increase in trauma-related mental health symptoms.

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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Young Children 3 Years Posttrauma : Prevalence and Longitudinal Predictors.

OBJECTIVE: Age-appropriate criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in young children have been established. The present study investigated the long-term course of such PTSD and its predictors in young children.

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Pre-event trajectories of mental health and health-related disabilities, and post-event traumatic stress symptoms and health : A 7-wave population-based study

It is unknown to what extent classes of trajectories of pre-event mental health problems (MHP) and health-related disabilities (HRD), predict post-event traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), MHP and HRD. Aim of the present 7-wave study was to assess the predictive values using a representative sample of adult Dutch (N=4052) participating in three health-surveys in November-December 2009 (T1), 2010 (T2), 2011 (T3). In total, 2988 out of 4052 also participated in trauma-surveys in April(T4), August(T5) and December(T6) 2012 and a fourth health-survey in November-December 2012 (T7).

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Performance of Complicated Grief Criteria

TO THE EDITOR: We read with interest the article by Cozza et al. on the accuracy of DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder criteria (1).The study suggests that complicated grief criteria are more sensitive in detecting cases with griefrelated symptoms than persistent complex bereavement disorder or prolonged grief disorder criteria, without compromising specificity.However,we feel that the article’s findings fail to prove superiority of the complicated grief criteria set.

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“Prolonged grief disorder” and “persistent complex bereavement disorder”, but not “complicated grief”, are one and the same diagnostic entity : an analysis of data from the Yale Bereavement Study

There exists a general consensus that prolonged grief disorder (PGD), or some variant of PGD, represents a distinct mental disorder worthy of diagnosis and treatment. Nevertheless, confusion remains over whether different names and proposed symptom criteria for this disorder identify the same or different diagnostic entities.

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Dieter Wolke: "Important developmental influences have been ignored" : Escap 2017 keynote lecture on long-term effects of bullying

Bullying is an underestimated threat to mental health. And it will stay that way as long as therapists do not understand how bullies tick and why the victims keep silent. Professor Dieter Wolke (University of Warwick, UK) is doing research on the subject.

As a keynote speaker at the ESCAP 2017 Congress, he will explain how serious an issue bullying is, outline the differences in emotional reception between pure victims and bully-victims, and discuss the different cognitive biases and how the problem can be addressed in interventions.

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Excessive Alcohol Use In Crisis-affected Societies : A Weak Spot of Global Mental Health Research and Practice

It is a positive development that researchers dealing with conflict-affected populations have become mindful of the complex interplay of contributing factors concerning the development and perpetuation of mental health disorders, and their role in the transmission and perpetuation of violence. For instance, it has become common to integrate multiple contextual, intra-, and inter-individual factors using conceptual frameworks (e.g., adaptations of Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological model) and longitudinal research strategies (e.g Amone-P’olak et al., 2013).

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Grief Responses in U.S. Military Families Following Soldier Loss

Grief has increasingly become a focus of attention within the military, with 80 percent of redeployed soldiers reporting knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed in theater (Thomas et al., 2010; Toblin et al., 2012). Among 15,938 military service members (SMs) who died between 2001-2011, the majority of the deaths were the result of traumatic events, including accidents (34 percent), suicides (15 percent), homicides (3 percent), and terrorism (less than 1 percent) (Cozza et al., in press).

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Authors' reply

Dr Halvorsen quite rightly draws attention to the various definitions of clinically significant change, which all have their advantages and disadvantages. We especially agree with the comment that the threshold for clinically significant change should at least coincide with the threshold for reliable change (18.66 in our sample).

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The Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5 (YAM-5) : Development and First Psychometric Evidence of a New Scale for Assessing Anxiety Disorders Symptoms of Children and Adolescents

The Youth Anxiety Measure for DSM-5 (YAM-5) is a new self- and parent-report questionnaire to assess anxiety disorder symptoms in children and adolescents in terms of the contemporary classification system.

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