The impact of torture on post-traumatic stress symptoms in war-affected Tamil refugees and immigrants

Abstract

The present study examines the effect of torture in generating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms by comparing its impact with that of other traumas suffered by a war-affected sample of Tamils living in Australia. Traumatic predictors of PTSD were examined among a subsample of 107 Tamils (refugees, asylum seekers, and voluntary immigrants) who had endorsed at least one trauma category on the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire. Principal components analysis (PCA) yielded five trauma factors that were applied to predicting PTSD scores. Tamils exposed to torture returned statistically higher PTSD scores than other war trauma survivors after controlling for overall levels of trauma exposur..