Complex posttraumatic stress disorder in men with serious mental illness: a reconceptualization.

This paper proposes a reconceptualization of serious mental illness (SMI) utilizing the concept of Complex-Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). While the effects of trauma in men have recently received increased attention, the impact of chronic exposure to interpersonal trauma during childhood remains under assessed and under recognized. This holds true particularly for men diagnosed with SMI. The study of two clinical case vignettes of men who have been psychiatrically hospitalized for many years illustrates the necessity of trauma assessments and trauma-focused treatments within this population.

Relationship of purported measures of pathological and nonpathological dissociation to self-reported psychological distress and fantasy immersion.

In order to investigate both the psychometric structure of the Dissociative Experiences Survey (DES) and the discriminant validity of the DES-Taxon (Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) as a specific marker of pathological dissociation, 376 non-clinical community based respondents completed the DES and a battery of psychopathology and imaginative involvement self-report measures. The DES was scored for both the Taxon and the DES-Absorption subscale. A DES subscale purported to tap normative dissociative processes. The two DES subscales demonstrated substantial overlap, both with each other (r = .80) and with the self-report measures with both DES scales comparably associated with high levels of psychological distress. Both DES subscales were also associated with elevated levels of "normative" imaginative involvement (fantasy proneness, absorption, daydreaming immersion). We conclude that both DES scales are largely indistinguishable from each other in relation to other self-report measures of psychopathology and fantasy access.