How Do We Assess Dissociation in Treatment Seeking Refugees in the West

Not enough attention is paid to dissociation in treatment of traumatized refugees in western countries. Knowledge about the assessment, the extent, and the content of dissociation in this group is lacking. An evaluation of measures and description of dissociative symptoms was carried out in 86 Bosnian treatment seeking refugees with the dissociation subscale of the Structured Interview for Disorders of Extreme Stress (SIDES-D), the self-report version of the SIDES-D (SIDES-D-SR), the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), and the DES-Taxon. The DES correlated strongly with the SIDES-D but they showed only moderate classification agreement. The DES was found to be the preferred measure since the SIDES-D seemed to partly tap correlates of lasting psychiatric illness. The DES-Taxon functioned well as an abbreviated version of the DES. Thirty percent of the group was estimated to have pathological dissociation. The most common dissociative symptoms in treatment seeking refugees are discussed, and characteristics of the presumably “dissociated” pre- and post-war personality, which was spontaneously observed during the clinical interviews.