Trauma and Mental Health: Individual and Collective Traumas

This chapter briefly reports the history of the term “trauma” and the evolution in the years of the nosography of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We will describe the main trauma-related disorders in the current nosography, including the complex PTSD (cPTSD), recently introduced in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision (ICD-11). Psychopharmacological treatments and psychological interventions for the management of PTSD will be reported. As individual trauma, Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) will be described, whose diagnostic criteria have been only recently introduced by the American Psychiatric Association in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5th Edition Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Concerning collective traumas, the most recent natural disasters occurred in our country are briefly reported, with more details for the L’Aquila 2009 earthquake. The social impact of the latter and the long-lasting consequences confirm the broader scientific literature concerning the reciprocal influence of the social environment on mental health and well-being.