Complex post-traumatic stress disorder

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
Causes	Prolonged (or repetitive) exposure to a traumatic event or traumatic events
Differential diagnosis	Post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, grief
Frequency	4% (general population)

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD, CPTSD, or cPTSD) is a stress-related mental disorder generally occurring in response to complex traumas: 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 known as disruptions in self-organisation (DSO). C-PTSD's symptoms include prolonged feelings of terror, worthlessness, or helplessness, distortions in identity or sense of self, and hypervigilance. Although early descriptions of C-PTSD specified the type of trauma (i.e., prolonged and repetitive), in the ICD-11 there is no requirement of a specific trauma type.