Illness that appears after suffering a traumatic experience such as a war, natural disaster, a serious accident or physical abuse.
Symptoms vary from person to person, appearing shortly after the traumatic experience or not up until years later. It can be present at all ages, including children.
It manifests with recurring memories that provoke anxiety, psychological distress, irritability, negative thoughts, decreased interaction with other people, inability to feel happiness, concentration problems, disturbed sleep in the form of nightmares or insomnia, feeling of being an observer of oneself from outside one's body, feeling of unreality of the environment, etc.
The diagnosis is clinical through questioning, usually directed by a psychiatrist or psychologist.
Treatment aims to reduce symptoms, promote adequate functioning and prevent chronic complications that may be disabling. Treatment is mainly psychotherapeutic, although it may include psychopharmacological help to stabilise specific symptoms.
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), American Psychiatric Association, Arlington 2013.
- Kessler RC, Rose S, Koenen KC, et al. How well can post-traumatic stress disorder be predicted from pre-trauma risk factors? An exploratory study in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. World Psychiatry 2014; 13:265.
- Jitender Sareen, MD, FRCPC. Posttraumatic stress disorder in adults: Epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical manifestations, course, assessment, and diagnosis. UpToDate.
- Kessler RC, Berglund P, Demler O, et al. Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2005; 62:593.
- Van Ameringen M, Mancini C, Patterson B, Boyle MH. Post-traumatic stress disorder in Canada. CNS Neurosci Ther 2008; 14:171.
- Koenen KC, Ratanatharathorn A, Ng L, et al. Posttraumatic stress disorder in the World Mental Health Surveys. Psychol Med 2017; 47:2260.
