ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre

Background: A significant proportion of patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) do not respond sufficiently to trauma treatment. To date, it has not been clearly demonstrated which patients respond well and which do not.

Objective: This study examined whether lifetime direct and interpersonal trauma exposure as well as the four distinct symptom clusters of PTSD were associated with treatment outcome.

The increasing scale and complexity of neuroimaging datasets aggregated from multiple study sites present substantial analytic challenges, as existing statistical analysis tools struggle to handle missing voxel-data, suffer from limited computational speed and inefficient memory allocation, and are restricted in the types of statistical designs they are able to model.

Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) are prevalent among Indonesian students. Web-based psychoeducation might increase mental health literacy and reduce barriers to healthcare access. We developed Pulihkan Luka (PL), a web-based psychoeducation programme for Indonesian undergraduate students. This pilot randomized controlled trial assessed the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of PL. Students (N = 130) were randomly assigned to (1) four to seven sessions of PL + Enhanced Usual Care (PL+EUC; n = 64) or (2) EUC only (n = 66).

The Traumatic Grief Inventory–Self Report Plus (TGI-SR+) is a widely used and reliable tool assessing Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) symptoms. This study examined the factorial structure and psychometric properties of the Italian TGI-SR+. A community sample of 308 participants aged 18–65 (M = 37.9, SD = 14.5) with 78.2% women completed the TGI-SR+ and measures of psychological distress, post-traumatic symptoms, and quality of life. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a unidimensional model. Reliability was excellent.

Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a new diagnostic category included in global diagnostic classification systems for mental disorders. However, PGD can only be diagnosed if the severity and duration exceed socio-cultural norms. Here, we present a new supplementary module to the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview: the Bereavement and Grief Cultural Formulation Interview (BG-CFI). The BG-CFI was developed to help clinicians provide a culturally informed diagnosis and guide treatment planning.

Emotion regulation (ER) has been found to contribute to psychological symptoms. Previous studies have mostly examined various aspects of ER in isolation. Comprehensive knowledge regarding the relative influence of distinct aspects of ER is lacking. Also, it is not clear whether distinct aspects of ER are associated with specific psychological symptoms.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been associated with aberrations in brain networks in the absence of a given cognitive demand or task, called resting-state networks. Prior work has focused on disruption in the static functional connectivity (FC) among specific regions constrained by a priori hypotheses. However, dynamic FC, an approach that examines brain network characteristics over time, may provide a more sensitive measure to understand the network properties underlying dysfunction in PTSD.

Background

Patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exhibit smaller regional brain volumes in commonly reported regions including the amygdala and hippocampus, regions associated with fear and memory processing. In the current study, we have conducted a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) meta-analysis using whole-brain statistical maps with neuroimaging data from the ENIGMA-PGC PTSD working group.

Methods

Mobile health applications (apps) are increasingly used to reduce mental health problems. However, few effective apps are available for bereaved adults. Recently, a randomized controlled trial demonstrated the short-term beneficial effects of access to the My Grief app in mitigating symptoms of prolonged grief and posttraumatic stress in bereaved parents. The present study examined the long-term outcomes of app access and their predictors in a longitudinal survey of participants who had access to the My Grief app.

The significance of moral conflicts that emerge during traumatic events and their influence on posttraumatic stress (PTS) and related symptoms are increasingly recognised. However, characteristics of the memories of these conflicts and how central these memories are within autobiographical memory remain largely unclear. In this study, students recalling trauma memories with a moral conflict were compared to students whose trauma memories did not include a moral conflict, in terms of the event-centrality of the trauma memory, memory characteristics, current emotional distress, and PTS.