Posttraumatic embitterment disorder, PTED

Abstract

It is generally accepted in clinical medicine that stressful life events can impair psychological and somatic functioning. It was shown that life events tend to occur to an extent greater than chance expectation before a variety of psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders. The effect is moderate in magnitude but varies with the type of illness. In most of these cases life events are not a sufficient explanation for the development of the mental disorders but part in a complex multifactorial causative chain including genetics, other biological factors, personality, coping style, social experience, or environmental factors (Paykel 1974; Finlay-Jones and Brown 1981; Van der Kolk et al. 1994, 1996; Paykel 2001a,b). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Vienna.