Posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD) between fallacy and facts: what we know and what we don't know?

BACKGROUND

PTSD been recognized as a major problem in public health and has attracted an ever-growing scientific, epistemological and clinical interest. On the other side, PTSD is one of the most controversial diagnosis in psychiatry as well as in medicine in general.

METHOD

We have made an overview of available literature on PTSD to identify what is our real knowledge about PTSD with all dilemmas, controversies and challenges.

RESULTS

We have various options as to how to evaluate, explain and describe PTSD and other trauma-related mental and somatic disorders. In this paper we compiled an extensive set of facts and meta-facts in order to to understand the real nature of traumatic stress, negative life events and PTSD.

CONCLUSION

Conflict between various concepts of PTSD and our current knowledge will probably bring with itself a new scientific paradigm with new diagnostic phenotypes and refining the old ones.