Surviving Hanukkah for Survivors of Child Abuse

Hanukkah starts on Tuesday, and for some adults who may have experienced sexual abuse as children, it could be a time for painful and traumatic memories.

Examiner.com offers several tips for abuse survivors to get through the holidays, and also offers advice for people who know abuse survivors:

Surviving Hanukkah: Jewish Survivors of Child Abus

On a similar note, Fearless Nation PTSD Support offers a great list of holiday coping tips for people with PTSD.

Fearless Journalism: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/Journalist Mac McClelland covers the human rights beat for Mother Jones magazine, and the experiences of her profession led to her developing PTSD. Here's her account, for Good magazine, about how it affected her. It's fearless journalism, and not easy to read, but well worth your time:

How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

PTSD and Worker's Comp

Research has consistently shown that trauma causes physical changes to the human brain. (See the PTSD News archive for several examples.) But if you are traumatized by your job, can you claim worker's comp?

In Wyoming, the answer is no. That state's Supreme Court ruled in December that the biological changes to the brain are not the same as physical injuries and are therefore not eligible for worker's comp.

The case came up when a volunteer firefighter experienced PTSD after seeing two of his coworkers burned and killed during a fire. The court called these "mental injuries" and said the law did not offer compensation for these types of wounds.

Read more: Risk & Insurance Online - Biological roots of PTSD don't trigger comp for physical injuries

What do you think? Should firefighters, police personnel, rescue workers and others be eligible for worker's comp due to PTSD? How about victims of workplace bullying or sexual harassment? Should PTSD be considered a physical injury? Let us know your thoughts.

Sexual Harassment and PTSD

A new study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examines why (and how) sexual harassment can cause PTSD.

The paper is behind a subscription firewall, but here's the abstract:

Researchers have compiled significant evidence demonstrating that sexual harassment leads to psychological harm, including the full symptom picture of PTSD, but few have examined the psychological processes involved. Research on attributions among trauma victims would suggest that causal attributions and perceptions of control may be important predictors of outcomes. The authors discuss a study involving a path model that used data from 189 women involved in sexual harassment litigation. Results indicate that both self-blame and harasser blame were positively related to PTSD symptoms. Control over recovery and the perception that future harassment is unlikely were both related to fewer PTSD symptoms. Unexpectedly, perceived control over future harassment is related to higher levels of PTSD symptoms. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Here's the link:

PTSD Symptoms and Sexual Harassment: The Role of Attributions and Perceived Control — J Interpers Violence

67% of prostitutes meet criteria for PTSD

Tim Bates, columnist for the Rome Observer, digs up some surprising statistics about prostitution:

"the Council for Prostitution Alternatives, in Portland, Oregon... found that 85 percent of surveyed prostitutes reported a history of sexual abuse in childhood, while 70 percent reported incest. Compare that to estimates of childhood sexual abuse in the general population at anywhere from 15- 38 percent of women and 12-16 percent of men...

"Other statistics ... over half have been raped or beaten by a client, more than three quarters have been physically assaulted while in prostitution and/or have attempted suicide, and that 67 percent meet diagnostic criteria for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)."

Bates is arguing that prostitution is hardly a "victimless crime," as many often see it, but tends to involve people who have already been traumatized victimized and makes it likely for the women to be further traumatized at every step.

Crimes against prostitutes are far too often ignored by the police. This is a segment of the population whose trauma almost makes them invisible.

Let's not forget that soldiers aren't the only people with PTSD, and that war takes on many forms.

Rape, PTSD & Breastfeeding

A traumatic event can affect a person's entire life, but what happens when another life is brought into the equation?

According to Dr. Wendy Walsh, writing on the site Mom Logic, victims of rape or other forms of sexual assault can find themselves triggered by something otherwise very natural: breastfeeding.

But as Walsh writes, women can also use breastfeeding as a way to empower themselves and take back their bodies from the memory of trauma.

Read more here:

Breastfeeding and Rape Trauma

People with Intellectual Disabilities Can Face Greater Risk of PTSD

People with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation, autism, etc) can face greater risks of getting PTSD from traumatic events, both because they are more vulnerable to it and because they are more vulnerable to being physically or sexually abused, according to a study published in Clinical Psychology Review.

It is also often hard for caregivers to recognize what someone with an intellectual disability finds to be traumatic, and PTSD symptoms may display differently in these people, so help isn't always forthcoming or easy to give.

Unfortunately, study of people with intellectual disabilities remains low, and their PTSD often goes untreated.

You can read more about this study -- which is actually a review of the small amount of literature on the subject -- here: PTSD in People with Intellectual Disabilities

Rape victim explores PTSD in new book

In her new memoir Denial, Jessica Stern discusses the lifetime of pain caused by her rape at gunpoint back in 1971.



Read more about it here:
Book Notes: Rape victim explores PTSD

Ecstasy & PTSD?

A new study suggests that the drug Ecstasy may have benefits for people with PTSD.

You need to be careful with stories like this, though. A headline like this one -- Ecstasy may be used to treat Veterans with PTSD -- isn't really true, nor does it support the study's actual results and conclusions.

Throwing vets into the headline doesn't even support the study's methods -- "The study group was mostly female victims of child sexual abuse and rape who suffered from PTSD for an average of about 19 years."

Then there's the group who conducted the study -- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies -- which has a pro-drug focus.

Still, any study of PTSD is welcome. Click the link above for more information on this one.

Abused children likely to have PTSD as adults

Kate M. Scott, Ph.D., M.A. Appl.(Clin Psych), and colleagues at University of Otago-Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, linked national child protection agency records with data from a nationally representative community survey of mental disorders among young adults age 16 to 27. The survey included 2,144 young adults, 221 of whom had a history of child maltreatment as indicated by child protection agency records.

After adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic factors, a history of abuse or neglect was associated with having any mental disorder and with five individual mental disorders—including anxiety, mood and substance abuse conditions—both over a lifetime and in the previous year. The strongest associations were with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Read more:

Abused children appear likely to have mental disorders as young adults

Special issue of Journal of the American Medical Association tackles PTSD

The August 5th, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association addresses themes of violence, trauma, PTSD, and sexual abuse, all under the heading "Violence and Human Rights."

Check out the table of contents here.