Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Victims of Childhood Incest

Abstract

The relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the experience of severe childhood incest was investigated in a comparison of 97 adult female victims of incest and 65 matched controls. It appeared that 62% of the incest victims and none of the controls met the DSM-III-R criteria for PTSD. The best predictor for the development of PTSD appeared to be the subjective reaction at the time of the event, consisting of anxiety, freezing and dissociation. The incest victims also displayed other psychiatric symptoms, such as self-mutilation and conversions. Although the relation incest-PTSD is quite obvious, the diagnosis may easily be missed because the symptoms may be masked by other psychiatric phenomena.

Dialectical Behaviour Therapy for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder after Childhood Sexual Abuse in Patients with and without Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomised Controlled Trial

“…However, the exclusion of patients with current NSSI behaviours seems problematic, as many PTSD patients with co-occurring BPD exhibit NSSI behaviours in order to reduce their suffering from intrusions or dissociative states [28,29]. Since both the manual on prolonged exposure and the standard DBT manual require the termination of NSSI behaviours before starting trauma-focused interventions [6,30,31], such patients would be excluded from receiving the trauma-focused treatment.…”

Gender Differences in the Impact of Child Sexual Abuse on Alexithymia, Dissociation and Self

“…Hence, the term 'pseudologia phantastica' is firmly rooted in the history of CSA. Only quite recently, during the second feministic wave in the last two decades of the 20ieth century it was acknowledged by academic psychology that CSA really occurs and that the effects can be traumatic enough to meet the criteria of PTSD (see Finkelhor & Browne, 1985;Albach & Everaerd, 1992;Albach, 1993;Zeitlin et al, 1993). However, the battle had not been won yet.…”

“…From research data evidence exists for the idea that psycho-traumata can indeed induce alexithymia (Hyer et al, 1990;Thomas et al, 1992;Berenbaum & James, 1994;Zlotnick, et al, 2001;Frewen et al, 2008). Victims of both rape (Zeitlin et al, 1993) and CSA (Albach & Everaerd, 1992;Berenbaum, 1996;Cloitre et al, 1997;Moormann et al, 1997;Sher & Twaite, 1999;Bermond et al, 2008) are known to suffer from alexithymia. Milder forms of CSA are not always associated with alexithymia (Paivio & McCulloch, 2004;Kooiman et al, 2004;Modestine, Furrer, & Malti, 2005).…”

Symptoms and long‐term outcomes for children who have been sexually assaulted

“…CSA involving penetration seems to be especially traumatic for these survivors, with about two-thirds of these adult survivors later experiencing varying degrees of PTSD at some point in their lifetimes (Albach & Everaerd, 1992;Williams, 1994). These survivors also frequently experience multiple traumatic events in their lives, which likely serve to exacerbate and magnify the trauma initiated by the CSA.…”