Diagnosing Trauma-Related Disorders

Our lives are shaped by both nature-instilled qualities and also the events that we experience. Just as our biology can go out of balance, leading our thoughts, mood, or behaviour to become disordered, so, too, can we become impaired by our experiences, leading to a distressed or disordered perception of the world. Individuals exposed to a stressful or traumatic event may come to have a trauma-related disorder, leading to responses ranging from anxiety to depression, from social withdrawal to repeated reliving of past events. Because these disorders are unique in their intrinsic connection to their inciting incident, clinicians must be familiar not only with the effects of a patient's disorder, but also its potential origins, and how those have altered the patient's sense of wellbeing. This course reviews post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including specifiers, how it manifests in children, and differential diagnosis; acute stress disorder (ASD); and adjustment disorders: specifically, reactive attachment disorder and disinhibited social engagement disorder. <p>&nbsp;</p> <b>DSM-5-TR update:</b> While this video discusses mental conditions in terms of how the diagnosis would be treated in the DSM-5, the current iteration of the DSM is the DSM-5-TR. However, the clinical material discussed in this video is still current.