Assessing posttraumatic stress disorder as outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

Abstract

The diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been a topic of heated debates for several decades. In 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) introduced significant changes to the way in which this disorder is diagnosed. For the first time in the history of PTSD in the DSM, the disorder was characterized by four latent factors (i.e., symptom clusters) and a dissociative subtype of PTSD was added as a diagnostic sub-category. Consequently, studies examining the latent structure of PTSD and the existence of the dissociative PTSD subtype started emerging all around the world, but primarily in the United States. The aim of the current thesis was to contribute to and extend this emerging literature by examining these two major changes in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD in Slovakia; a country in Eastern Europe, where DSM-related research has been largely neglected. A systematic literature review of PTSD’s latent structure (Chapter 3) and the reviews in Chapters 4 and 6 of this thesis showed that there have been no studies on this topic conducted in Slovakia. The empirical chapters of this thesis utilized data collected from students at six universities in Slovakia. Contrary to the existing literature and the DSM5, the best-fitting model of PTSD was the six-factor Anhedonia model (Chapter 4), the construct validity of which was supported in relation to the external variables of anxiety and depression (Chapter 5). Chapters 6, 7 and 8 of this thesis examined the dissociative PTSD subtype and supported the existence of this diagnostic construct in Slovakia. However, the analyses suggested that the DSM-5 definition of the dissociative PTSD subtype may be inadequate. The results have important implications for future revisions of the PTSD diagnostic criteria in the DSM.

Date of Award	Feb 2018
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland
Supervisor	Cherie Armour (Supervisor) & Mark Shevlin (Supervisor)