Posttraumatic stress reactions in tortured refugees: Relationship to pain, cognitive impairments, and negative appraisals

Beskrivning

Refugees, particularly those exposed to torture and other forms of organized violence, often experience a wide range of difficulties, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and somatic disturbances, particularly pain. Multimodal treatments have been developed to target this comorbidity in refugees, with evidence suggesting they are moderately effective. The overall aim of this thesis was to identify ways in which we might improve the efficacy of the multimodal treatment provided to tortured refugees seeking treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety and somatic complaints. This was done by exploring the relationship between pain and PTSD in this population, at a specialist outpatient clinic in Copenhagen; DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, both at a symptom level, and at the level of two cognitive processes that had previously been shown to be important to the severity, duration, and impact of PTSD (negative trauma-related beliefs) and pain (pain catastrophizing).
Another way of identify ways to improve treatment, was to find out to what extent the clients suffered from cognitive impairments based on a brief screening measured developed for this purposes (SDMT), and whether such impairments were related to traumatic brain injury (TBI), severity of PTSD, depression, anxiety, pain and overall functioning. With these aims, we hoped to
help fill important informational gaps in the literature regarding the extent of pain, cognitive impairments and TBI in traumatized refugees.

Period	2012 sep. 10 → 2020 jan. 31
Examinerad/handledd person
Examination/handledning vid	Institutionen för psykologi
Omfattning	Internationell