Wang SK, Feng M, Fang Y, Lv L, Sun GL, Yang SL, Guo P, Cheng SF, Qian MC, Chen HX. Psychological trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder and trauma-related depression: A mini-review. World J Psychiatry 2023; 13(6): 331-339 [PMID: 37383283 DOI: 10.5498/wjp.v13.i6.331]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Ping Guo, Doctor, MD, Associate Chief Physician, Deputy Director, Department of Psychiatry, The Third People’s Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou University, No. 2088 Tiaoxi East Road, Wuxing District, Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang Province, China. gp12131997@126.com
Research Domain of This Article
Psychiatry
Article-Type of This Article
Minireviews
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Shi-Kai Wang, Min Feng, Yu Fang, Liang Lv, Gui-Lan Sun, Sheng-Liang Yang, Ping Guo, Shan-Fei Cheng, Department of Psychiatry, The Third People’s Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou University, Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang Province, China
Min-Cai Qian, Department of Neurosis and Psychosomatic Diseases, The Third People’s Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou University, Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang Province, China
Huan-Xin Chen, Department of Key Laboratory, The Third People’s Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou University, Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang Province, China
Author contributions: Wang SK contributed to the original draft; Feng M contributed to the data curation, investigation, and software; Fang Y contributed to the investigation and software; Lv L contributed to the investigation and software; Sun GL contributed to the validation and visualization; Guo P contributed to the funding acquisition and supervision; Cheng SF contributed to the visualization; Qian MC contributed to the project administration and resources; Yang SL contributed to the conceptualization and methodology; Chen HX contributed to the writing-review and editing; all authors have reviewed and approved the final version.
Supported bythe Science and Technology Project of Zhejiang Provincial, No. GF22H093655; Nonprofit Applied Research Project of Huzhou Science and Technology Bureau, 2021GYB16.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Ping Guo, Doctor, MD, Associate Chief Physician, Deputy Director, Department of Psychiatry, The Third People’s Hospital Affiliated to Huzhou University, No. 2088 Tiaoxi East Road, Wuxing District, Huzhou 313000, Zhejiang Province, China. gp12131997@126.com
Received: December 28, 2022 Peer-review started: December 28, 2022 First decision: March 1, 2023 Revised: March 15, 2023 Accepted: May 8, 2023 Article in press: May 8, 2023 Published online: June 19, 2023 Processing time: 172 Days and 21.6 Hours
Abstract
There are various types of traumatic stimuli, such as catastrophic events like wars, natural calamities like earthquakes, and personal trauma from physical and psychological neglect or abuse and sexual abuse. Traumatic events can be divided into type I and type II trauma, and their impacts on individuals depend not only on the severity and duration of the traumas but also on individuals’ self-evaluation of the traumatic events. Individual stress reactions to trauma include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complex PTSD and trauma-related depression. Trauma-related depression is a reactive depression with unclear pathology, and depression occurring due to trauma in the childhood has gained increasing attention, because it has persisted for a long time and does not respond to conventional antidepressants but shows good or partial response to psychotherapy, which is similar to the pattern observed for PTSD. Because trauma-related depression is associated with high risk of suicide and is chronic with a propensity to relapse, it is necessary to explore its pathogenesis and therapeutic strategy.
Core Tip: Exposure to psychological trauma may induce posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma-related depression. Major depression can be a progression secondary to PTSD. Both trauma-related depression and PTSD show good response to psychotherapy or prazosin, but a poor response to conventional antidepressants, suggesting that trauma-related depression should have different pathological mechanisms, like energy metabolism deficiency. It is necessary to explore the pathogenesis of and therapeutic strategy for PTSD and trauma-related depression.
