Aspects Of PTSD Research Articles

Shattered Minds, Silent Nights: Unveiling PTSD Narratives in Kishwar Desai’s novel “Witness the Night”

Kishwar Desai’s COSTA first novel award winner, Witness the Night, is thought-provoking and realistic. The story unfolds into a secluded world where the major characters exhibit various aspects of PTSD. Due to gender bias, their family members ignored Sharda, and Durgaey started living in their secretive world. Understanding the magnitude and effects of childhood mistreatment, sexual abuse, and negligence is needed to curtail childhood trauma. As a result of trauma, survivors of childhood sexual abuse will also exhibit psychological, physical, and behavioural symptoms. The coping mechanisms of the characters help in the changing setup of this murder mystery, where the key suspect is a fourteen-year-old heiress.

PTSD in the Prison System

The treatment of Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder in the federal prison system has fallen in quality, if it can ever be said to have been sufficient. This work presents an analysis of PTSD in Veterans, identifies the deficiencies in prison systems to address the mental health aspects of PTSD, and presents solutions to address the needs of our soldiers.

An exploration of violence, mental health and substance abuse in post-conflict Guatemala.

Guatemala's 36-year civil war officially ended in December 1996 after some 200,000 deaths and one million refugees. Despite the ceasefire, Guatemala continues to be a violent country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. We investigated potential associations between violence, mental health, and substance abuse in post-conflict Guatemala using a community-based survey of 86 respondents living in urban and rural Guatemala. Overall, 17.4% of our respondents had at least one, direct violent experience during the civil war. In the post-conflict period, 90.7% of respondents reported being afraid that they might be hurt by violence, 40.7% screened positive for depression, 50.0% screened positive for PTSD, and 23.3% screened positive for alcohol dependence. Potential associations between prior violent experiences during the war and indicators of PTSD and aspects of alcohol dependence were found in regression-adjusted models (p < 0.05). Certain associations between prior civil war experiences, aspects of PTSD and alcohol dependence in this cohort are remarkable, raising concerns for the health and safety of the largely indigenous populations we studied. Higher than expected rates of depression, PTSD, and substance abuse in our cohort may be related to the ongoing violence, injury and fear that have persisted since the end of the civil war. These, in turn, have implications for the growing medical and surgical resources needed to address the continuing traumatic and post-traumatic complications in the post-conflict era. Limitations of the current study are discussed. These findings are useful in beginning to understand the downstream effects of the Guatemalan civil war, although a much larger, randomly sampled survey is now needed.

Culturally-Appropriate Assessment of PTSD in Native American Veterans: A Poster Presentation

A veteran’s cultural background is relevant to and intertwined with the veteran’s PTSD symptomatology. Researchers at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder have discovered ethnocultural variations in the way veterans communicate symptoms of PTSD and other anxiety and depressive disorders in a clinical setting. See Anthony J. Marsella, Claude Chemtob & Roger Hamada, Ethnocultural Aspects of PTSD in Vietnam War Veterans, 1 NCP (Nat’l Ctr. for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), Fall 1990, at 3 (noting research showing “individuals from non-Western cultural traditions often fail to present classical symptoms of [anxiety and depressive disorders]” and, as a result, that “it is quite possible that ethnocultural minority veterans suffering from PTSD and related disorders may be wrongly diagnosed and inappropriately treated”). Researchers have long urged Compensation and Pension examiners in the VA to use culturally-sensitive clinical assessment procedures that fully explore potential cultural aspects of PTSD in a minority veteran. See id. (“Many questions used in clinical tests and interviews . . . are inappropriate in content for assessing ethnocultural minorities and thus do not accurately index problems that may be present.”); see also Terence M. Kean, Danny G. Kaloupek & Frank W. Weathers, Ethnocultural Considerations in the Assessment of PTSD, in ETHNOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER: ISSUES, RESEARCH, AND CLINICAL APPLICATIONS 183 (Anthony J. Marsella ed., Am. Psych. Assoc. 1st ed. 1996) (rejecting a single-instrument approach to diagnosing and assessing PTSD across different cultures). Published clinical assessments have demonstrated the kind of complex cultural issues that interact with PTSD and illustrated the kind of comprehensive assessment necessary to fully understand the multifaceted mental health issues of Native American Veterans suffering from PTSD. See, e.g., Jay H. Shore & Spero M. Manson, The American Indian Veteran and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Telehealth Assessment and Formulation, 4 FOCUS 99 (2006). My research is exploring the extent to which the VA is actually implementing culturally-appropriate clinical assessment procedures to assess the severity of PTSD in Native American Veterans for purposes of service-connected disability compensation. Without system-wide implementation of culturally-appropriate assessment procedures, Native American Veterans are likely receiving inaccurate disability ratings, and thus inappropriate disability compensation.