Trauma and disaster throw lives into chaos and fill people with the fear of loss, injury, and death. Although most individuals experience only transitory posttraumatic symptoms, others experience the effects of the disaster long after the traumatic event when new experiences remind them of the past.


Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Acute and Long-Term Responses to Trauma and Disaster provides clinicians, researchers, and policy makers with an examination of current advances in research and treatment by recognized experts at the cutting edge of innovation. This timely book incorporates DSM-IV criteria and the new diagnostic category acute stress disorder, which emphasizes the breadth of posttraumatic stress symptoms and disorders and the importance of distinguishing between acute and long-term responses to traumatic events. Individual chapters go beyond PTSD to examine other posttraumatic disorders and responses, the mechanisms of transmission of posttraumatic stress, and its effects on behavior and health in natural and societal disasters and traumas, including war. This volume pays particular attention to the array of psychiatric responses to trauma, including PTSD and the unfolding of illness and recovery over time. Posttraumatic responses are considered across individual, group, family, and community perspectives and from the vantage point of developmental systems from childhood to older adult life.