Article

In 2010, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD)
jointly published the revised VA/DOD Clinical Practice Guideline for Management
of Posttraumatic Stress.
The Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) provides
evidence-based recommendations for diagnosing and treating a spectrum of
stress-related disorders. Included in the CPG were recommendations for assessing
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other stress disorder-related functional
impairment. This article complements those CPG recommendations by providing
information that may further guide clinicians in the assessment of functional
impairment related to PTSD and other stress-related disorders. We briefly review
some of the empirical literature on the association between PTSD and functional
impairment and some of the more frequently used methods and measures for
assessing functional impairment and introduce a new measure currently being
developed by our group. We suggest that information obtained via patient
self-report and/or clinician rating be supplemented whenever possible with
collateral data from friends, family members, coworkers, or supervisors to
provide a complete picture of current and premorbid functional status. Finally,
we explore several important issues that we encourage clinicians to keep in mind
when assessing functional impairment among Veterans and Active Duty servicemembers.

Langue : ANGLAIS