Post-traumatic stress disorders and coping resources of internally displaced persons

Abstract

The article analyses post-traumatic stress disorders and resources for coping with stress in internally displaced persons. The analysis of literature sources has led to an understanding of the consequences of experiencing forced migration as a state of high intensity stress, which with a high degree of probability entails the development of post-traumatic stress disorders. The author describes a psychosocial situation that is of particular interest due to the complex nature of the impact of stress on the personality of an internally displaced person: their life story often contains, along with the experience of being in a war zone, repeated traumatisation due to living in new places, which sometimes causes no less powerful distress (culture shock, acculturation stress, migrantophobia). When analysing migrants' resources for coping with stress, we should rely on the three-level approach to the structure of human personality, which is established in psychology. The success of migrants' adaptation is correlated with individual characteristics, including gender, ethnic minority, age, neuroticism and extraversion, therefore, the focus on the middle level is designated as cognitive-personal and operationalised through the construct of basic beliefs of the individual, which are generally defined as global, stable ideas of the individual about the world and about himself/herself that influence thinking, emotional states and behaviour; higher - described by the system of meaningful life orientations of a person, which characterises a person as a subject of life-creation, and is an integral systemic characteristic that reflects the actual attitude of a person to a situation, understood as meaningful life orientations of a person.