Traumatic Stress Disorders

For those who have experienced trauma and suffer a subsequent mental health disorder, ongoing research is identifying psychotherapies, medications, and lifestyle changes that can help.

Validating some patients could lead to both clinician and patient harm.

What is new in research on posttraumatic stress disorder?

With hate speech prevalent on college campuses and elsewhere, a psychiatrist ponders the psychiatric perspective and importance of therapeutic speech.

From sleep and neuroendocrine function following TBI to new phase 3 results from a clinical trial evaluating a promising new schizophrenia treatment, here are highlights from the week in Psychiatric Times.

Experts discuss findings from a new trial exploring affect-focused psychotherapies for LGBTQ+ patients with PTSD at the 2023 APA Annual Meeting.

Could police brutality be part of a larger legacy of American trauma transmission?

Poetic musings on posttraumatic growth...

Can we inherit our parents’ trauma? Research points to yes.

All these events that occurred over the weekend bear social psychiatric weight.

Sometimes poetry can help in processing tragedies and traumas.

What psychiatric illnesses are most prevalent among veterans? And how can clinicians help them overcome obstacles to care?

A working model for eliminating stigma and transforming mental healthcare within the military.

How should the sociopolitical nature of PTSD as a diagnosis inform our understanding of trauma?

New research find altered states of consciousness may allow veterans and other patients with PTSD to face unspeakable experiences and find peace.

The pandemic has triggered an array of emotional, physical, and economic issues but in the midst of this crisis, nations have shared and learned from each other’s experiences.

Patients want to pass on many things to their children; trauma is not one of them.

We have learned that in order to provide much-needed social support during difficult times, organizations should prepare to take certain steps.

While recovering from trauma, survivors have a chance to find a voice, meaning, and even beauty.

Patients with serious mental illness such as schizophrenia are more likely to report greater impairment in general functioning as a result of trauma, which is why trauma-informed care is so important.

Infectious outbreaks have shaped the psyche of humanity for times immemorial.

The recognition of a wide range of traumatic experiences-physical or sexual assault, motor vehicular accidents, natural disasters, terrorism-has implications for understanding the vulnerability to vicarious trauma inherent in a clinician’s practice.

Successful, trauma-informed care for patients with serious mental illness requires providers to assess, acknowledge, and treat trauma.

The privacy and security of our offices-the therapeutic bunkers within which our wounded patient-warriors hunker down against an unseen enemy-is the fundamental first barricade between private sufferings and the potential for public humiliation.

As psychiatrists, we practice holistic medicine. Our traumatized patients depend on us to uncover their emotional pain delicately, to understand its effects on their minds and bodies, and to recognize and draw on their unique strengths and vulnerabilities as we promote recovery.

Traumatic brain injury, criminal responsibility, traumatic stress, and autism spectrum/neurodevelopmental disorders slideshow

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?

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."