Post-traumatic stress disorder in children: controversies and unresolved issues.
OBJECTIVE
Questions regarding how severely traumatized children may meet diagnostic criteria for an accurate diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the comorbidity of PTSD with many other psychiatric illnesses, and the possibility that PTSD is not a valid diagnostic formulation as it has been applied to children and adolescents demonstrate that the currently held concept of PTSD may not be operationally sound.


OBJECTIVE
To explore recent empirical studies to demonstrate the current state of controversy and postulate future direction of the conceptual framework.


METHODS
Selected published literature.


CONCLUSIONS
PTSD in children and adolescents, as it is popularly understood as a conceptual framework, is found to be undergoing a conceptual metamorphosis.
Tierney
J A
JA
Wright State University-Miami Valley, College of Nursing and Health, Dayton, OH, USA. june008@aol.com
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000296:Adolescent Psychiatry; D002648:Child; D002665:Child Psychiatry; D015897:Comorbidity; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D002666:Psychology, Child; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012307:Risk Factors; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology