This paper will expand upon several published articles and books that reports on case study’s and different examinations of children diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The research was conducted through an online database and will help report on several factors on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder such as the history of the disease in correlation to other stress disorders, diagnosis in children, symptoms, certain risk factors, and therapy for children suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The paper will examine published articles taken from psychiatric evaluations and studies done on children over the previous and current years. The research will focus mainly on childhood maltreatment, which relates to symptoms of …show more content…
Whether it was a caveman burning himself with fire or a hunter falling in the field trauma to the body can be brought upon by many things. The American Psychiatric Association finally recognized PTSD as a mental disorder in 1980 when they added it to their third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders also known as the DSM-III (Friedman, n.d.). The concept of PTSD was brought about by the causing agent being outside the diagnosed individual in the form of a traumatic event instead of it being a result of the individual in the form of traumatic neurosis. The scientific basis of PTSD is best understood through its clinical expression within the concept of “trauma” through certain events whether it is through childhood experiences or as a result of …show more content…
Later it was perceived to be a mental disorder brought upon by dramatic trauma in all ages and genders. Research has based the diagnosis of childhood PTSD by identifying four different symptoms. Some of these symptoms include avoidance of internal thoughts or feelings, sense of a foreshortened future, and a highly internalized thought process when it comes to basic verbal communication (Scheeringa, 2008). A study was done using these several symptoms in children who had recently been involved in a traumatic motor vehicle accident. It assessed 60 children 2-6 years old and 49 children 7-10 years old about 2-4 weeks after the traumatic accident had occurred. The results showed that about 10% of the children studied developed the criteria to make a logical diagnosis of PTSD. It also was brought to attention that 6 months after the accident 69% of the children involved in the study retained the necessary criteria in their symptoms to diagnosis them as unstable as a result of PTSD (Scheeringa, 2008). This was one of the larger studies performed which lead to a breakthrough of PTSD studies in early childhood development due to the attention needed of traumatic accidents while the brain is still