Mental health
CHALLENGING
PTSD DEFINITIONS
Professor Thanos Karatzias hopes to
change the way sufferers are treated
Referring to military personnel,
Thanos says: “In a treatment-seeking
population, combat stress would be
the referring problem in most cases.
However, if you look into their history,
you would find an accumulation
of different life events.”
So why is childhood trauma so
important? Thanos, who has also
studied trauma in prison populations,
says that it can lead to a whole host
of negative outcomes:
Jason Fox at Edinburgh
Napier University
W
hen Jason Fox spoke at
Edinburgh Napier in 2017,
he described how he left
the armed forces having been signed
off sick and put on antidepressants,
but was assured that the moment he
left, he would feel better. However,
he found himself hiding from friends
and “failing at life”. It was only much
later that ‘Foxy’, the star of TV show
SAS: Who Dares Wins, realised he was
suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD).
Now the University’s Professor
Thanos Karatzias is doing ground-
breaking work on a new condition
linked to childhood and multiple
“Recent work we’ve done suggests
that those who have experienced
both childhood and adulthood trauma
tend to commit their first offence at
an earlier age and when they do it
is at a more severe level than those
with no childhood or adulthood
trauma. We also know childhood
trauma is associated with self-harm,
violent offending and drug use.”
Professor
Thanos Karatzias
trauma and its relevance to military
personnel like Foxy. This work is
set to lead to a new psychiatric
classification of Complex PTSD and
could have a wide-ranging impact
on the way sufferers are treated.
Thanos has discovered that when
looking at those seeking treatment
for traumatic stress in adulthood,
it is rare to find someone who has
only been exposed to one traumatic
life event. Most trauma survivors
will have suffered childhood trauma
which has created a vulnerability for
further exposure to traumatic events
in adulthood.
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The next step is to gain full
recognition for the condition so
that better treatments can be
developed. To this end, Complex
PTSD is proposed to be included in
the International Classification of
Diseases (ICD-11) as defined by the
World Health Organisation (WHO).
Interested
in this project?
Professor Thanos
Karatzias
School of Health &
Social Care
[email protected]