Complex post-traumatic stress disorder
| Complex post-traumatic stress disorder | |
|---|---|
| Other names | Formerly: Enduring personality change after catastrophic experience (EPCACE) |
| Potential causes of complex post-traumatic stress disorder | |
| Specialty | Psychiatry, clinical psychology |
| Symptoms | Hyperarousal, emotional over-stress, intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation, hypervigilance, negative self-beliefs, interpersonal difficulties, attention difficulties, anxiety, depression, somatization, dissociation |
| Duration | > 1 month |
| Causes | Prolonged (or repetitive) exposure to a traumatic event or traumatic events |
| Differential diagnosis | Post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, grief |
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD, cPTSD, or hyphenated C-PTSD) is a stress-related mental disorder generally occurring in response to complex traumas (i.e., commonly prolonged (or repetitive) exposure to a traumatic event (or traumatic events), from which one sees little or no chance to escape).
In the ICD-11 classification, C-PTSD is a category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with three additional clusters of significant symptoms: emotional dysregulation, negative self-beliefs (e.g., shame, guilt, failure for wrong reasons), and interpersonal difficulties. C-PTSD's symptoms include prolonged feelings of terror, worthlessness, helplessness, distortions in identity or sense of self, and hypervigilance. Although early descriptions of C-PTSD specified the type of trauma (i.e., prolonged, repetitive), in the ICD-11 there is no requirement of a specific trauma type.