Category Archives: Tips & findings

8 Guiding Principles for Peer Support Programs in High-Risk Organizations

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This guest post is by Dr. Tracey Varker. Tracey is a research fellow at the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health and specializes in mental health of emergency services personnel, among others.

Peer support programs have emerged as standard practice for supporting staff in many high-risk organizations – that is organizations which routinely expose their personnel to potentially traumatic events such as emergency services, rail services, and the military¹. Despite their increasing popularity and implementation across a range of high-risk organizations, the published literature mostly comprises descriptive studies, often with small samples and cross-sectional designs, or longitudinal designs without comparison groups². Continue reading →

Does self-help treatment for anxiety disorders work?

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This blogpost has recently appeared on the Mental Elf blog. I thought it may interest you as it focuses on self-management for anxiety disorders, including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Many people struggle with anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, social phobia, and PTSD. Moreover, about 30% of us have an anxiety disorder at some point in our life (Kessler et al 2005) but most people never receive treatment.

Self-help interventions may provide a solution when people are unable or unwilling to participate in face-to-face treatment: waiting lists don’t have to be an issue, there is no need to travel to appointments, and costs can be low.

But do these interventions work? And if so, how well do they work compared to face-to-face treatment? Continue reading →

Does being optimistic help you recover from trauma?

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Last week, we had every reason to be shocked again about how cruel our world can be. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado, was in bizarre contrast with the fun evening that the movie goers expected to have. There was the one-year anniversary of Breivik’s attack in Norway. Our TVs screened ongoing, severe violence in Syria and other parts of the world. Not much reason to be optimistic, it seems.

However, the personality factor ‘optimism’ in itself may be an important asset when confronted with terrible things: Continue reading →

A Quarter of Cases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Is With Delayed Onset

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This month’s guest post is by Geert Smid. Geert is a psychiatrist with Foundation Centrum ’45, the Dutch national institute for specialized diagnosis and mental health treatment after persecution, war and violence. He is also a researcher at Arq Psychotrauma Expert Group. Geert completed his PhD on Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in 2011 with a number of beautiful publications. He’ll make your brain work a little on this very topic:

According to the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, delayed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) must be diagnosed in individuals fulfilling criteria for PTSD if the onset of symptoms is at least 6 months after the trauma. The prevalence of delayed PTSD has for a long time remained unclear, and only few studies have examined factors that may explain its occurrence. The findings summarized below are based on prospective investigations in disaster survivors and unaccompanied refugee minors, as well as a comprehensive meta-analysis of prospective studies.

1. About a quarter of PTSD cases is with delayed onset. The results of our meta-analysis showed that delayed PTSD occurs in about one quarter of all PTSD cases. The risk of delayed PTSD did not decrease between 9 and 25 months after the traumatic event, and when traumatized populations were followed up for longer periods of time, more delayed PTSD cases were found. These findings suggest ongoing potential risk for some individuals.

2. During the interval between the trauma and delayed PTSD onset, some symptoms are likely to occur. Delayed PTSD occurred most often in individuals already reporting “subthreshold” symptoms after the traumatic event. These symptoms Continue reading →

Are we winning the fight against Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?

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It’s the question Richard McNally, an eminent PTSD scholar in the US, posed in Science earlier this month. The journal devoted a special issue to human conflict and McNally zoomed in on PTSD after combat duty. His comments are worth sharing and have implications that go beyond the military: Continue reading →