PTSD, Trauma & Stress Disorders

This article highlights several features of medical and social importance that are somewhat unique to the Somali refugee community in the US.

If our survey on medical cannabis is any indication, psychiatrists are widely-and deeply-divided on whether and how marijuana should be used in clinical practice. You can read the results here.

Calling all psychiatrists: we conducted a survey of your opinions about prescribing medical cannabis and invite you to view the results.

To understand the psychodynamics of the dissociative fugue, Dr Michael Sperber analyzes some of the characters in a collection of interrelated vignettes set in small town America.

Combat veterans who have suffered a moral injury in the past may be predisposed to a recurrence of the painful memories associated with previous trauma after exposure to similar traumatic events with moral overtones.

This psychiatrist has learned to ask if his Hmong patients have also consulted a shaman to help with their depressive symptoms and with their PTSD.

Over half of the population is exposed to at least one lifetime traumatic event, yet relatively few of those exposed have lasting psychiatric sequelae. As psychiatrists, we attend to the needs of those who suffer.

PTSD is a psychiatric illness resulting from a physical or psychological trauma that is sometimes related to warfare, but of course occurs in the case of civilian trauma as well. However, wars have been a propitious time for studying PTSD.

About a year ago, I wrote the blog “Are Dogs Man's Best Therapist?” To my surprise, it turned out to be a very popular one. Since then, dogs continue to be in the news for their therapeutic effect, including being brought to Newtown right after the mass murder there.

The role of prevention of trauma and prevention of functional impairment after trauma is paramount, because this may disrupt the accumulated physiological and psychological effect of stressors in the individual.

James Dao reports in the New York Times that the military is considering 2 steps to reduce its startling rate of active duty suicides-which is approaching an unacceptable one suicide every day. Both measures are completely sensible, but neither goes nearly far enough.

With understandable urgency, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has made suicide one of his top priorities, instructing commanders at all levels to feel acutely accountable for it. The numbers are startling. On average 1 active duty soldier is killing himself each day--twice the number of combat deaths and twice the civilian rate.

Apathy is our enemy. Pain, paradoxically, is our ally because it is one of the most powerful fuels we have to impel us to a different and better tomorrow.

A treatment model for soldiers returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other areas of conflict, “RESPECT-Mil” reaches out to soldiers affected by anxiety, PTSD, and depression.

The Holocaust is well known and has been well researched. The purpose of this study was to evaluate persons 65 years after the Holocaust who remained in Poland and discovered the “secret” of their Jewish ancestry, despite not being raised as Jews.

After Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne suffered a traumatic brain injury and PTSD from a near fatal horseback riding accident, he retired from public life, secluded himself in one of the towers of his château, and devoted himself to writing.

The first half of the 20th century saw 2 world wars, indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust-all of which created intense trauma for soldiers and civilians.Yet it was not until the American intervention in a post-colonial civil war in Southeast Asia that the psychiatric community in the 1970s formally described what we now call PTSD.

In preparing DSM-IV, we worked hard to avoid causing confusion in forensic settings. Realizing that lawyers read documents in their own special way, we had a panel of forensic psychiatrists go over every word to reduce the risks that DSM IV could be misused in the courts.

When counseling trauma victims and patients with PTSD, do you ask them to retell the trauma or do you think this prolongs it?

Exposure-based therapies are highly effective for patients with anxiety disorders, to the extent that exposure should be considered a first-line, evidence-based treatment for such patients. In clinical practice, however, these treatments are underutilized, which highlights the need for additional dissemination and training.

Colonel David M. Benedek, MD-a psychiatrist-takes a brief look at the emotional fallout of war in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and points you to the "The Clinical Manual for Management of PTSD."

Members of the military returning from combat operations have high rates of substance abuse. They also often exhibit a co-occurring triad of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and pain, which complicates the problems with substance abuse.

This article, based on a comprehensive review by Weathers and associates, provides a selective and brief summary of trauma and PTSD assessments in adults.

Nada Stotland, MD, MPH briefly considers the psychological effects of abortion.

David Osser, MD, and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School summarize key aspects of the Psychopharmacology Algorithm for PTSD.