Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (cont.)
How is PTSD assessed?
For individuals who may be wondering if they should seek evaluation for PTSD
by their medical or mental-health professional, self-tests may be useful. The
National Institute of Mental Health offers a self-test for PTSD. The assessment of PTSD can be difficult for practitioners to make since
sufferers often come to the professional's office complaining of symptoms other
than anxiety associated with a traumatic experience. Those symptoms tend to
include body symptoms (somatization), depression, or drug addiction.
Individuals with PTSD may present with a history of making suicide attempts. In
addition to depression and substance abuse disorders, the diagnosis of PTSD
often co-occurs (is comorbid with) bipolar disorder (manic depression), eating
disorders, and other anxiety disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic
disorder, social anxiety disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
Most practitioners who examine a child or teenager for PTSD will interview
both the parent and the child, usually separately, in order to allow each
party to speak freely. Interviewing the child in addition to the adults in their
life is quite important given that while the child or adolescent's parent or
guardian may have a unique perspective, there are naturally things the young
person may be feeling that the adult is not aware of. Another challenge for diagnosing PTSD in children,
particularly in younger children, is that they may express their symptoms
differently from adults. For example, they may go backward or regress in their
development, become accident-prone, engage in risky behaviors, become clingy, or
suffer from more physical complaints as compared to adults with PTSD.
Traumatized younger children may also have trouble sitting still, focusing, or
managing their impulses and therefore be mistaken as suffering from attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Sometimes, professionals will use a rating scale or a structured psychiatric interview for
children in its entirety or just the portion that assesses PTSD in order to test
for PTSD. Examples of such tools include the Diagnostic Interview for Children
and Adolescents-Revised (DICA-R), the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for
Children-Version IV (DISC-IV), and the Schedule for Affective Disorders and
Schizophrenia for School Age Children (K-SADS). There are also some
PTSD-specific structured interviews, like the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale-Child and Adolescent Version, the Child PTSD Checklist, and the Child PTSD
Symptom Scale. For the assessment of the severity of PTSD symptoms in children,
structured interviews like the Child Posttraumatic Stress Reaction Index, the
Child and Adolescent Trauma Survey, and the Trauma Symptom Checklist for
Children are sometimes used. The Child Trauma
Screening Questionnaire has been found by some professionals to be useful in
predicting which children who endure a traumatic event will go on to develop PTSD.
Next: How is PTSD treated? »
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