Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)

As far as it is known, there is no longitudinal study in Turkey investigating the follow-up and treatment of children and adolescents exposed to trauma. This study is planned to reassess children and adolescents with trauma exposure who were evaluated in Istanbul Faculty of Medicine Child Psychiatry outpatient clinic as part of a thesis study one year ago (January-April 2024) and to examine how many of them continue to meet the criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), how many receive a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), and which factors are associated with these outcomes. In this way, it is aimed to contribute to the literature on the long-term effects of trauma exposure. Additionally, since there is no scale in our country that assesses the diagnosis of CPTSD in children, the study also aims to translate the Child and Adolescent Trauma Screen Scale - 2 (CATS-2) into Turkish and examine its psychometric properties.

The aim of this study is to assess the psychiatric evaluation of children and adolescents exposed to trauma in the outpatient clinic and to determine the prevalence of PTSD and Complex PTSD (CPTSD) diagnoses. Additionally, it aims to compare the clinical characteristics of children exposed to trauma who do not receive a PTSD diagnosis, those diagnosed with PTSD, and those diagnosed with CPTSD, as well as to examine the trauma history of their parents and the severity of their anxiety and depression. Furthermore, since there is no existing scale to assess CPTSD in children in our country, the study also aims to translate the International Trauma Questionnaire - Child and Adolescent Version into Turkish and evaluate its psychometric properties.

This study aims to characterize emotional dysregulation in complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) and to determine the extent to which it can promote the distinction with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As emotional dysregulation is a dynamic process whose phenomenological manifestations are labile, associated with physiological modifications and modulated by cognitive processing, a multiple methodology associating measurements in a real-life ecological context with measurements performed in the hospital will be preferred. Overall, this study proposes to capture, for the first time, the clinical manifestations associated with cPTSD from the perspective of emotional dysregulation and its underlying processes