Integrating process and structure in group therapy for survivors of trauma

Dimensional approaches to studying, assessing, and treating traumatic stress: Introduction to the Special Section

“…This has contributed to a tradition of understanding not only posttraumatic stress but also trauma in categorical terms: Not only is PTSD, like other psychiatric disorders, categorical but so is the traumatic experience that renders a person eligible for a diagnosis-that is, using the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria, PTSD is traditionally diagnosed on the basis of a single specific Criterion A stressor (for review and commentary, see Marx et al, 2024). There is nevertheless increasing interest in taking a dimensional approach to understanding trauma and its psychological correlates (Yalch et al 2022(Yalch et al , 2023. Much of this research has concerned the structure of PTSD and disorders that frequently co-occur with it, which shows, among other things, that PTSD is best represented in terms of a multidimensional structure, the dimensions of which often do not match the four clusters of the diagnosis (e.g., Armour et al, 2015;Harpaz-Rotem et al, 2014;Sumner et al, 2015), and that PTSD symptoms can be represented along with other symptom sets as broader spectra of internalizing problems (e.g., Pietrzak et al, 2015).…”

“…There is nevertheless increasing interest in taking a dimensional approach to understanding trauma and its psychological correlates (Yalch et al. 2022, 2023). Much of this research has concerned the structure of PTSD and disorders that frequently co‐occur with it, which shows, among other things, that PTSD is best represented in terms of a multidimensional structure, the dimensions of which often do not match the four clusters of the diagnosis (e.g., Armour et al., 2015; Harpaz‐Rotem et al., 2014; Sumner et al., 2015), and that PTSD symptoms can be represented along with other symptom sets as broader spectra of internalizing problems (e.g., Pietrzak et al., 2015).…”