Weathers' and Keane's, “the criterion A problem revisited: Controversies and challenges in defining and measuring psychological trauma”

✍ Scribed by T Maier

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 45 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-9867
• DOI: 10.1002/jts.20294

✦ Synopsis

With great interest I have read the recent article by Weathers and Keane (2007) on the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) A-Criterion. The authors give a brilliant overview of this widespread debate and review the relevant arguments comprehensibly. Yet I feel that they hesitated to some extent in consequently drawing the obvious conclusions from the presented arguments.

The authors review concisely the difficulties in defining traumatic events and demonstrate that an event is never per se traumatic, but only with respect to a particular individual. Therefore, it is more accurate-as the authors do-to talk about potentially traumatic events instead of traumatic events. I also greatly welcome the authors' careful conceptual distinction between trauma/traumatic event and the consequences of traumatic events (e.g. PTSD). I feel, however, that the whole discussion about potentially traumatic events is fundamentally confused and misleading, because this is not what the DSM is all about. The DSM is not aiming to find out what a trauma is, but what a posttraumatic stress disorder is. The manual is designed to phenomenologically assess clusters of symptoms to identify underlying pathological entities. Ideally, the entities characterized through this descriptive approach will be confirmed in the future in terms of neurobiology and neuroanatomy. From a scientific point of view, it is therefore essential to define clinical entities such as PTSD by