The growing literature conceptualizing mental disorders like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as networks of interacting symptoms faces three key challenges. Prior studies predominantly used (a) small samples with low power for precise estimation, (b) nonclinical samples, and (c) single samples. This renders network structures in clinical data, and the extent to which networks replicate across data sets, unknown. To overcome these limitations, the present cross-cultural multisite study estimated regularized partial correlation networks of 16 PTSD symptoms across four data sets of traumatized patients receiving treatment for PTSD (total N = 2,782). Despite differences in culture, trauma type, and severity of the samples, considerable similarities emerged, with moderate to high correlations between symptom profiles (0.43–0.82), network structures (0.62–0.74), and centrality estimates (0.63–0.75). We discuss the importance of future replicability efforts to improve clinical psychological science and provide code, model output, and correlation matrices to make the results of this article fully reproducible.

Traumatic events pose great challenges on mental health services in scarcity of specialist trauma clinicians and services. Simple short screening instruments for detecting adverse psychological responses are needed. Several brief screening instruments have been developed. However, some are limited, especially in relation to reflecting the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis. Recently, several studies have challenged pre-existing ideas about PTSD’s latent structure. Factor analytic research currently supports two four factor models. One particular model contains a dysphoria factor which has been associated with depression and anxiety. The symptoms in this factor have been hailed as less specific to PTSD. The scope of this article is therefore to present a short screening instrument, based on this research; Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – 8 items. The PTSD-8 is shown to have good psychometric properties in three independent samples of whiplash patients (n=1710), rape victims (n=305), and disaster victims (n=516). Good test-rest reliability is also shown in a pilot study of young adults from families with alcohol problems (n=56).

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The ICD-11 proposes different types of prolonged trauma as risk factors for complex PTSD (CPTSD). However, CPTSD's construct validity has only been examined in childhood abuse, and single trauma exposure samples. Thus, the extent to which CPTSD applies to other repeatedly traumatized populations is unknown. This study examined ICD-11's PTSD and CPTSD across populations with prolonged trauma of varying interpersonal intensity and ages of exposure, including: 1) childhood sexual abuse, 2) adulthood trauma of severe interpersonal intensity (refugees and ex-prisoners of war), and 3) adulthood trauma of mild interpersonal intensity (military veterans, and mental health workers). In support of the proposal, latent class analysis (N = 820) identified, a 4-class solution representing "PTSD", "CPTSD", and "non-pathological" classes, but also an "Anxiety symptoms" class, and an alternative 5-class solution, with a "Dissociative PTSD-subtype" class. ICD-11's CPTSD was not exclusively associated with childhood abuse, but also with exposure to adulthood trauma of severe interpersonal intensity. Furthermore, all types of prolonged trauma were equally associated with the "Anxiety symptoms" class. Finally, of all the classes, the "CPTSD" class was associated with the highest frequency of work-related functional impairment, indicating an association between the severity of prolonged trauma exposure and the level of posttraumatic residues.