Assessing PTSD Symptoms

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious and prevalent mental health disorder that poses significant challenges for accurate assessment and diagnosis. This chapter describes some of the most widely used PTSD assessment tools for adult trauma survivors, including structured interviews, self-report measures, and biologically based methods, with an eye toward updates reflecting the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) PTSD criteria.  It also discusses several key issues in PTSD assessment, including identifying an index traumatic event for symptom inquiry, linking symptoms to the index event, assessing for the new dissociative subtype, and detecting exaggerated symptom reporting.  The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of future directions for research on PTSD assessment.