Internally displaced "victims of armed conflict" in Colombia: the trajectory and trauma signature of forced migration.

While conflict-induced forced migration is a global phenomenon, the situation in Colombia, South America, is distinctive. Colombia has ranked either first or second in the number of internally displaced persons for 10 years, a consequence of decades of armed conflict compounded by high prevalence of drug trafficking. The displacement trajectory for displaced persons in Colombia proceeds through a sequence of stages: (1) pre-expulsion threats and vulnerability, (2) expulsion, (3) migration, (4) initial adaptation to relocation, (5) protracted resettlement (the end point for most forced migrants), and, rarely, (6) return to the community of origin.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill: the trauma signature of an ecological disaster.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon “British Petroleum (BP)” oil spill was a mega-disaster characterized as the petroleum industry’s largest-volume marine oil spill in history. Following a “wellhead blowout” that destroyed the drilling platform, 4.9 million barrels of petroleum flowed into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days and the spill expanded to cover 68,000 square miles of sea surface.

Trauma and PTSD rates in an irish psychiatric population: A comparison of native and immigrant samples.

Although Western mental health services are increasingly finding themselves concerned with assisting traumatized individuals migrating from other countries, trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are under-detected and undiagnosed in psychiatric populations. This study examined and compared rates of traumatic experiences, frequency of traumatic events, trauma symptomatology levels, rates of torture, rates of PTSD and chart documentation of trauma and PTSD between (a) Irish and migrant service-users and (b) forced migrant and voluntary migrant service-users in Dublin, Ireland. Data were gathered from 178 psychiatric outpatients attending using a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire-Revised Cambodian Version and the SCID-I/P.