Complex PTSD: When Trauma Changes More Than Memory

And a really important distinction is with PTSD, it is not a separate diagnosis currently in the fifth text revised version of the DSM.

So in the U S we, we use the DSM five text revision and, But the World Health Organization, they use what's the ICD version 11, and they do recognize complex PT as a distinct diagnosis.

And I think that distinction, it matters because under the ICD 11, for their diagnosis of complex PTSD, You first have to meet the full core features of PTSD, and I'm not going to go through those necessarily because I've done episodes on that in the past.

But to meet the diagnosis for complex PTSD in the ICD-11, there has to be the – the PTSD, but also additional disturbances in self-organization.

And what that basically means is there's problems in emotional regulation and self-concept and and interpersonal relationships.

And this is where getting a full neuropsych eval and diagnostically really having a strong understanding of diagnostics is really important because if you follow the program, you can see a lot of this could look like personality disorders.

And I'll talk about that in a little bit.

So I get a lot of times referrals of people say like, you know, ask them like, you know, who referred you for testing? What are some of the clinical questions you want answered? And I've noticed this myself that a lot of people, I have CPSD, CPTSD, which is kind of hard to say sometimes, just like try and say toy boat 10 times as fast as you can.

It's hard.

So when someone says I have complex PTSD, I said, you know, one of the first clinical questions I would ask is what exactly do you mean by that? Is that The ICD-11 disorder, is it just the current PTSD with like really dysregulated mood and cognition? Is it PTSD with like dissociation or like depersonalization, derealization, borderline personality? Yeah.

or people using complex trauma descriptively.