Client presentation and choice of therapy is often a challenge for clinicians. There are often many facets of a client’s experience of PTSD. This includes dissociative experience, multiple traumas, chronicity, severity, experience of tonic immobility and self-blame. All these may be considerations in the choice of therapy. Research suggests that
Practice Makes Perfect Less PTSD Symptoms Engaging your clients in practice outside a session has always been thought an important factor for improvement in many therapies. In a 2017 article in the journal Behavior Therapy (doi:10.1016/j.beth.2017.12.001) this commonsense idea was supported by the data for Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). What
Clients often present with a range of reactions to trauma, and sometimes these don’t meet criteria for a diagnosis. It can be difficult to know what choices to make regarding therapy in these cases. In a December 2013 article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress this question was addressed.
There is a difference between PTSD nightmares, normal nightmares and night terrors. This is important to know because there are different treatment options for each. Nightmares are unpleasant dreams that are usually remembered upon waking. Sleep terrors involve feelings of intense fear, screaming, and thrashing around while still asleep, the
A recently published study has shown that the proposed ICD-11 criteria identified fewer PTSD cases than the ICD-10. This reduction ranged between 47.09% to 57.14%. The highlights Over 97% of ICD-11 PTSD cases met criteria for ICD-10 PTSD criteria. PTSD symptom severity of individuals identified by the ICD-11 criteria was
Professionals working in trauma often receive requests for critical incident debriefing. Sometimes there is pressure from worried managers to ensure staff’s well-being is covered, and that the organisation’s liability will be minimised. However, the notion of debriefing ‘psychologically’ has shown to be ineffective, and may do more harm than good.
Precise risk factors for PTSD are very difficult to establish. In broad terms they can be divided into two parts. First is exposure to trauma(s), which is the first criterion of PTSD. The second factor is not to do with exposure to trauma, but personal circumstance, aspects of the trauma
There are many terms in psychology that can be confusing. Particularly when the concepts can be co-occurring. The difference between dissociation and tonic immobility will be explained below. It is useful to know this difference as it has clinical implications. First I will explain what dissociation is and what tonic
Is vicarious traumatisation something clinicians treating trauma need to be concerned about, what should they do about it? The notion of vicarious trauma was initially introduced by McCann and Pearlman (1990) in their article, Vicarious Traumatization: A Framework for Understanding the Psychological Effects of Working with Victims. The framework indicated
Knowing the difference between anxiety and paranoia is important for best client care. The challenge for clinicians is to clarify whether beliefs and protective behaviours to keep one safe from potential and unknown threats are different from the beliefs and behaviours that are driven by, and driving paranoia. Many clients