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Comment
. 2020 Oct;33(5):866-868.
doi: 10.1002/jts.22592. Epub 2020 Oct 2.

Is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Meaningful in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Response to Van Overmeire's Commentary on Karatzias et al. (2020)

Mark Shevlin  1 , Philip Hyland  2   3 , Thanos Karatzias  4   5
Affiliations
Comment

Is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Meaningful in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Response to Van Overmeire's Commentary on Karatzias et al. (2020)

Mark Shevlin et al. J Trauma Stress. 2020 Oct.

Abstract

In a recently published study in this journal that used a population-based sample in the Republic of Ireland (Karatzias et al., 2020), we concluded that 17.7% of the sample met the diagnostic requirements for COVID-19-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Subsequently, Van Overmeire (2020) has raised concerns about the validity of our findings, arguing that simply experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic is not sufficient to meet the trauma exposure criterion for a PTSD diagnosis and, consequently, our estimated PTSD prevalence figure was inflated. In this response, we provide (a) an explanation for why the COVID-19 pandemic can be reasonably considered to be a traumatic event, (b) evidence that PTSD in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a meaningful construct, and (c) an argument for why our estimated prevalence rate is not unreasonably high.

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References

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