Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
RESEARCH UPDATE REVIEWTen-Year Review of Rating Scales. IV: Scales Assessing Trauma and Its Effects
Section snippets
POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER RATING SCALES
Until recently, children were viewed as largely unaffected by trauma (Rigamer, 1986). It is now well recognized that traumatized children often demonstrate posttraumatic stress symptoms and even the full PTSD syndrome after a variety of traumatic experiences (Fletcher, 1996;Saigh, 1991;Yule, 1992). In fact, younger children appear more likely to develop PTSD than adolescents and adults (Fletcher, 1996). Girls may be at greater risk for PTSD than boys (Shannon et al., 1994), although this
SCALES MEASURING DISSOCIATION
Dissociation is a well-recognized reaction to trauma. Although challenging to define, it has been conceptualized as a person's attempts to protect himself or herself from an overwhelming stressor by altering self-awareness (Herman, 1992). Dissociation is hypothesized to exist along a continuum from normal to pathological; for example, from daydreaming to absorption in typical daily issues to preference for fantasy over reality in dealing with stressors. However, some dissociative phenomena,
OTHER TRAUMA-RELATED SCALES
This section covers scales that are neither PTSD based nor symptom scales, but scales that evaluate the traumatic experience itself, assess youths’ perception of the trauma and its impact on their lives, and measure others’ responses to youths following their trauma. The traumatic events include childhood abuse and neglect, sexual abuse, and environmentally related traumas.
Childhood abuse differs from other trauma because it is so often characterized by recurrence, chronicity, and perpetration
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Because work with traumatized youths is relatively new, so are the available rating scales. Most have been developed during the past decade or are still in development. They do not yet have a rich database of applications. Therefore, the contribution of these scales to understanding the experience and needs of traumatized youths is not yet clear. Scales measuring PTSD, related symptoms, and dissociation appear useful for documenting youths’ symptoms and distress across multiple areas, but it is
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