Trauma Blog

Training Ukrainian mental health professionals in evidence-based treatments for traumatic ‎stress
StressPoints
Date posted: 12/19/2023
Topic: International and Global
In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. As a result, millions of people have been exposed to war and war-related trauma, and the world is witnessing an immense mental health crisis. Ukrainian mental health systems cannot address this crisis effectively alone, and the main reason is that mental health professionals in the country generally are not trained in evidence-based care for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma-related sequelae. A National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty-funded project (1D43TW012463) recently started by Drs. Liberzon and Nickelsen aims to change that.

Genocidal Rape – An Understudied Source of Terror with Horrendous Consequences
Date posted: 06/1/2023
Topic: International and Global
Genocidal rape is a widespread issue in genocidal settings, but has previously received minimal scholarly attention. Consequences for victims are widespread, and include illness, psychological terror, and social exclusion. Multi-leveled supportive programs and interventions are critical in supporting victims.

Global perspectives: Achieving inclusion of individuals with disability: The cultural dimension
StressPoints
Date posted: 06/28/2023
Topic: International and Global
Culture, defined as local beliefs, practices, role assignments and symbolic practices by which men and women live (Eagleton, 2016), can play a formative role in demarcating members of a shared collective. It can shape what members of a community perceive as important and problematic cultural issues. Culture is also dynamic. Community members and structures, both carriers of cultural knowledge, ascribe roles and responsibilities by which individuals operate and make meaning of perceived differences among them, including disability status (Ingstad & Grut, 2007). Furthermore, the perceptions and assignment of status of people by a society affect issues of development for individuals with disabilities and orients the phenomenon, disability, relative to what is considered socially and culturally by a group as normative (Devlieger, 2005).

Terror leaves adolescents behind
Date posted: 05/19/2023
Topic: International and Global
Exposure to terror increases the risk of somatic and psychological health problems in survivors. Yet, knowledge of how such exposure affects survivors’ ability to stay in school is lacking. 

Child PTSD Symptoms Following Acute Trauma: Associations Among Informant Reports and Child HR Parameters
Date posted: 04/26/2023
Topic: International and Global
esearch has evidenced that gold standard structured diagnostic interviews are often times too resource intensive to administer in clincal settings. Rating scales offer practical, reliable, and valid methods of identifying, measuring, and tracking mental health symptoms though they rely largely on the subjective perspective of the informant. The present research aimed to expand our existing understanding of what can be learned from self- and parent-report measures of child posttraumatic stress symptoms by exploring the patterns of association among these report measures and child heart rate indices in an acute injury sample.

What are asylee's impressions of leading psychotherapies for posttraumatic stress?
Date posted: 04/12/2023
Topic: International and Global
Psychotherapy with an exposure component (ex. CBT, NET, EMDR) has received the most research support for treating posttraumatic stress among individuals seeking asylum. However, there are concerns that the emotionally challenging nature of exposure work may decrease treatment engagement and increase attrition. Ours is the first study to gather perspectives from individuals seeking asylum on which empirically supported treatments they perceive as most credible and comfortable to engage in. 

President’s Message
Date posted: 09/29/2022
Topic: International and Global
Pakistan has experienced historic and devastating flooding resulting from the interaction between melting glaciers in the northern regions of the country and monsoon rains. Over 1,400 lives have been lost, and over 33 million people are directly affected, experiencing loss of housing, property, livestock, crops, and infrastructure. In addition to the direct effects of the flooding, the country now faces food shortages and the spread of infectious diseases, exacerbated by the potential of the flooding taking months to recede. In addition to the physical health needs of those affected, the mental health toll of the disaster will no doubt be high. The need for scalable prevention and early interventions for trauma-related psychological distress is clear. Building from the knowledge base of the ISTSS Treatment Guidelines, the Executive Committee coordinated ISTSS’s collaboration with the World Health Organization, and partner Phoenix Australia, to contribute to further guideline development in this area.  

President's Message
StressPoints
Date posted: 07/28/2022
Topic: International and Global

The relevance of ISTSS remains high during these troubling times when much of the news from around the world is that of trauma. Once considered outside of the range of normal human experience (DSM-III), it is now recognized that exposure to traumatic events is ubiquitous globally, making the work that ISTSS does even more critical. The Board of Directors recently concluded our mid-year board meeting where much of the focus was a thorough review of our Strategic Plan progress. This review process made one thing very clear: Despite our shared and individual challenges over the last few years, ISTSS members and leaders have remained steadfast in their pursuit of the ISTSS mission and Strategic Plan. I will take this opportunity to highlight some recent areas of progress. 

A Neglected Aspect of Refugee Relief Works: Secondary and Vicarious Traumatic Stress
Date posted: 05/2/2022
Topic: International and Global
With the number of refugees (about 80 million at present) increasing in the world recently, the need for refugee service providers (e.g., doctors, psychotherapists, lawyers, interpreters) to support this group and the workload of refugee service providers have also increased. Adverse effects of working with traumatized individuals on mental health are known. The most prominent effects are Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) and Vicarious Traumatic Stress (VTS).

Global Perspectives: Lineages of a Psychological Understanding of Mourning ‎and Grief in China
StressPoints
Date posted: 05/4/2022
Topic: International and Global
Grief and mourning are expressed differently in every culture. However, research on bereaved populations has tended to be dominated by Western perspectives since Freud's (1917) Mourning and Melancholy. Drawing from more recent bodies of knowledge in clinical psychology and psychiatry, health professionals have shown a shift in direction and have included the assessment and diagnoses of specific states of grief. Specifically, professionals have regarded certain states of grief as disorders or requiring assistance, such as prolonged grief disorder found in the International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD-11; World Health Organization, 2020) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2021). Furthermore, cultural differences in grief symptoms have been shown to exist as illustrated by a comparative study of Chinese- and German-speaking bereaved individuals (Stelzer et al., 2020).