Impact of dissociation and interpersonal functioning on inpatient treatment for early sexually abused adults

Little is known about the possible predictors of treatment outcome in early chronically sexually abused adults. The current study aimed to investigate what impact initial levels of dissociation and pre-treatment negative change in interpersonal functioning have on treatment response after 3 months of first-phase trauma inpatient treatment as well as after a period of 1 year the patients returned to their usual lives.

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Helping traumatized families

The new edition of the classic Helping Traumatized Families not only offers clinicians a unified, evidence-based theory of the systemic impact of traumatic stressit also details a systematic approach to helping families heal by promoting their natural healing resources. Though the impact of trauma on a family can be growth producing, some families either struggle or fail to adapt successfully.

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Helping Elderly Patients to Avoid Suicide : a Review of Case Reports from a National Veterans Affairs Database

This study examines the health system factors associated with completed suicide among veterans older than 65 years. All root cause analysis reports of suicides that occurred between 2008 and 2010 in the Veterans Health Administration were reviewed, of those, 46 reports were for those 65 years or older. The average age in the sample was 76.96 years, all were men. Method of suicide, stressors, previous attempts, root causes, and action plans designed to address the root causes are reported.

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Exposure to violence during childhood is associated with telomere erosion from 5 to 10 years of age: a longitudinal study

There is increasing interest in discovering mechanisms that mediate the effects of childhood stress on late-life disease morbidity and mortality. Previous studies have suggested one potential mechanism linking stress to cellular aging, disease and mortality in humans: telomere erosion. We examined telomere erosion in relation to children's exposure to violence, a salient early-life stressor, which has known long-term consequences for well-being and is a major public-health and social-welfare problem.

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Empirical Support for the Definition of a Complex Trauma Event in Children and Adolescents

Complex trauma events have been defined as chronic, interpersonal traumas that begin early in life (Cook, Blaustein, Spinazzola, & van der Kolk, 2003). The complex trauma definition has been examined in adults, as indicated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., DSM-IV) field trial, however, this research was lacking in child populations. The symptom presentations of complexly traumatized children were contrasted with those exposed to other, less severe trauma ecologies that met 1 or 2 features of the complex trauma definition.

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Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can Nightmares Be Inherited?

The Holocaust left its visible and invisible marks not only on the survivors, but also on their children. Instead of numbers tattooed on their forearms, however, they may have been marked epigenetically with a chemical coating upon their chromosomes, which would represent a kind of biological memory of what the parents experienced. as a result, some suffer from a general vulnerability to stress while others are more resilient. Previous research assumed that such transmission was caused by environmental factors, such as the parents' childrearing behavior.

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ESTSS and ISTSS: 'heterozygous twins'

The development of traumatic stress studies during the past decades has much profited from professionals from the United States and from Europe. However, these professional societies, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) still struggle to find an equal common pathway. This is a personal retrospective view of Berthold Gersons, past president of ESTSS on behalf of the 20th anniversary of ESTSS.

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Evidence for proposed ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD: a latent profile analysis

The WHO International Classification of Diseases, 11th version (ICD-11), has proposed two related diagnoses, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD within the spectrum of trauma and stress-related disorders. To use latent profile analysis (LPA) to determine whether there are classes of individuals that are distinguishable according to the PTSD and complex PTSD symptom profiles and to identify potential differences in the type of stressor and severity of impairment associated with each profile.

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Effectiveness of National Implementation of Prolonged Exposure Therapy in Veterans Affairs Care

IMPORTANCE Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a pervasive and often debilitating condition that affects many individuals in the general population and military service members. Effective treatments for PTSD are greatly needed for both veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and veterans of other eras. Prolonged exposure (PE) therapy has been shown to be highly efficacious in clinical trials involving women with noncombat trauma, but there are limited data on its effectiveness in real-world clinical practice settings and with veterans.

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Dissociative disorders in DSM-5

The rationale, research literature, and proposed changes to the dissociative disorders and conversion disorder in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) are presented. Dissociative identity disorder will include reference to possession as well as identity fragmentation, to make the disorder more applicable to culturally diverse situations. Dissociative amnesia will include dissociative fugue as a subtype, since fugue is a rare disorder that always involves amnesia but does not always include confused wandering or loss of personality identity.

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