Roughly, one out of four patients with a substance use disorder (SUD) also meets criteria for PTSD. Both disorders seem to be highly intertwined. Two chapters of this thesis focus on the development of a screening questionnaire to detect PTSD within substance abuse treatment centers. For this purpose, a PTSD screener from the United States army was used, the Primary Care posttraumatic stress disorder screen (PC-PTSD). Based on the results of this study a new screener was assembled and cross-validated: the Jellinek-PTSD screening questionnaire (J-PTSD).

Debates about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often turn on whether it is a timeless, cross-culturally valid natural phenomenon or a socially constructed idiom of distress. Most clinicians seem to favor the first view, differing only in whether they conceptualize PTSD as a discrete category or the upper end of a dimension of stress responsiveness. Yet both categorical and dimensional construals presuppose that PTSD symptoms are fallible indicators reflective of an underlying, latent variable.

Abstract

It is sometimes said that ‘water comes in three kinds: too little (drought), too much (floods) or too dirty (polluted)’. Floods are the most widespread disaster on land and can be generated by excessive precipitation coupled with saturation of the ground, very rapid rainfall which generates flash floods, rapid snowmelt, storm surges, tsunamis, the breaching of volcanic crater lakes or anthropogenic causes such as dam bursts. The devastating power of water necessitates precautionary and protective measures.