The significance of addressing trauma in outpatient psychiatry

Abstract

Establishing post-traumatic stress disorder as a psychiatric diagnosis has only marginally increased awareness of traumatic experiences. Traumas are inconsistently recorded in initial psychiatric histories and, when observed, rarely reflected in the primary diagnosis and treatment. The present study aimed to investigate if there is an association between sufficiently addressing trauma and long-term outcome and what factors affect whether trauma, according to the patient’s view, is sufficiently addressed or not. Socio-demographic data, experiences of trauma and treatment, and outcome, were collected retrospectively from Arabic, Iranian, Turkish and Swedish patients, who had visited a psychiatric clinic 3 /4 years earlier. Fifty-one patients whose traumatic experiences had been sufficiently addressed were compared with 39 patients who perceived that their traumas had not been addressed. Logistic regression analyses were performed to examine relationships between clinical variables and whether or not traumas had been addressed. Patients with trauma sufficiently addressed reported high confidence in staff (odds ratio, OR /7.2, pB/0.001), high self-rated health (OR /8.0, pB/0.01) and low scores on the Self-rating Inventory for PTSD (OR /7.7, pB/0.05) and Depression Scale (OR /3.0, pB/0.15). Reporting less than five different traumas (OR /4.6, pB/0.01) and being an ethnic Swede (OR /2.4, pB/0.10) were the background variables independently related to having trauma sufficiently addressed. Addressing trauma may improve patients’ confidence in staff, self-rated health and trauma-related symptoms. Multiplicity of traumas and belonging to an ethnic minority implied that trauma was less addressed.