Introduction to the Special Section: Developmental Perspectives on Trauma Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress

Abstract

has argued for a perspective that has had limited impact on the diagnostic compendia, and that is a developmental lens (e.g., Garber, 1984;Kerig 2017;Pynoos et al., 2009; Wolraich et al., 1997). Children and youth are not just a subspeciality within clinical science; rather, all humans begin life in childhood and the psychological, social, biological, and epigenetic processes that have their onset in early life are critical to understanding the adults we become (Kerig et al., 2012). To this end, this special section brings together a set of papers devoted to developmental perspectives on the phenomenology, assessment, diagnosis, and developmental psychopathology of PTSD and other trauma-related disorders.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD in eating disorder treatment‐seekers: Prevalence and associations with symptom severity

“…Debates about appropriate PTSD diagnostic criteria and conceptualizations of CPTSD are ongoing and have been discussed in detail elsewhere (e.g., Cloitre, 2021;Cloitre et al, 2020). Although ICD-11 CPTSD criteria were introduced to capture the effects of prolonged, inescapable stressors-including, but not exclusively, childhood trauma-some researchers advocate for a purely developmental approach to the diagnosis (e.g., see Kerig, 2023). In contrast, others have argued against differentiating CPTSD and PTSD entirely (e.g., Resick et al, 2012).…”