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Vulnerability to PTSD: Psychosocial and Demographic Risk and Resilience Factors

  • Chapter
Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract

The risk of developing PTSD after a traumatic experience depends on several vulnerability factors that may be classified into three distinct categories—pre-traumatic, peri-traumatic, and posttraumatic. Accordingly, while attempting to draw the profile of the high-risk patient for PTSD, the following factors should be included, among others: the history of previous trauma, the history of previous psychiatric disorder, female gender, ethnic minority, high severity of initial posttraumatic symptoms (ASR), associated body injury, “high-risk” traumatic event (man-made trauma), and peri-traumatic dissociation. In contrast, various resilience factors may be protective and act to prevent the development of PTSD. Although resilience factors were generally not discussed in this chapter, future research should be designed to uncover resilience factors, in order to differentiate between high-risk and low-risk patients in order to identifying the patients at risk and to attempt to develop the strategies to prevent the development of PTSD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Rambam Health Care Campus, Haifa, Israel

    Marina Bar-Shai M.D., Ph.D. & Ehud Klein M.D.

  2. Faculty of Medicine, Technion IIT, Haifa, Israel

    Marina Bar-Shai M.D., Ph.D. & Ehud Klein M.D.

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  1. Marina Bar-Shai M.D., Ph.D.
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  2. Ehud Klein M.D.
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Correspondence to Ehud Klein M.D. .

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Marilyn P. Safir

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Helene S. Wallach

  3. Department of Psychiatry and School of Gerontology, University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Albert "Skip" Rizzo

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Bar-Shai, M., Klein, E. (2015). Vulnerability to PTSD: Psychosocial and Demographic Risk and Resilience Factors. In: Safir, M., Wallach, H., Rizzo, A. (eds) Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7522-5_1

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