title: Traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms among Swedish adolescents. A pilot study using Dis-Q-Sweden.
abstract: The aim of this study was to explore the occurrence of dissociative symptoms in relation to reported traumatic experiences among adolescents. A normative sample of 216 adolescents and a clinical sample of 30 cases with a history of traumatization were given the Swedish translation of Dissociation Questionnaire, DIS-Q. The results showed that 8.8% of the adolescents reported scores above the cut-off score of 2.5 on the Dis-Q-Sweden, with a female-male ratio of 2.6:1. In the normative sample, 53 (24.5%) of the adolescents reported one or more trauma experiences. The adolescents who self-reported trauma experiences in the normative sample scored higher on the total Dis-Q-Sweden scores and on three of the four subscales compared to the adolescents with no such experiences. The clinical group exhibited significantly higher Dis-Q-Sweden scores than the normative sample on every scale, with 60% above the cut-off score. The study confirms the results from earlier studies that adolescents with a history of trauma exhibit more dissociative symptoms in this study according to Dis-Q-Sweden. The impact of trauma qualities and background factors on the development of dissociative symptoms need to be studied further.
authors.affiliation: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Lund University, Sweden. CarlGoran.Svedin@skane.se
authors.forename: Carl Göran
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Svedin
authors.forename: Doris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nilsson
authors.forename: Charlotta
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lindell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004213:Dissociative Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012307:Risk Factors; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013548:Sweden