Are Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer Typically Psychological Trauma?
We asked breast cancer patients and were surprised by their responses to 2-stage screening and semi-structured interviews. Then we asked Vets who had a confirmed PTSD to comment.
February 2024 Introduction
I downloaded a fresh 2024 graph from the Web of Science of the number of papers per year combining <cancer> and <trauma> since the notion of cancer as being a trauma was introduced in the 1980s. The graph dramatically illustrates the accelerating trend of many more publications per year.
My earlier blog post argued that poor-quality self-report measures of “trauma” would yield exaggerated estimates of the rates of PTSD. I had grant funds for more expensive studies involving interviewers who were clinically trained to conduct structured interviews. My team consistently got much lower estimates of PTSD and clinical depression than the many studies that only relied on self-reports.
I also was one of the few researchers who had grants for interview studies of both patients drawn from primary care waiting rooms and tertiary care breast cancer clinics. I was as surprised as anyone else was both self-report screening scores and interview-based diagnoses were almos…