Trauma Pervasively Elevates Brief Symptom Inventory Profiles in Inpatient Women

Abstract

The Brief Symptom Inventory was administered to 228 women ( M age: 37) consecutively admitted to specialized inpatient treatment for trauma-related disorders. Subsamples of patients were administered different posttraumatic stress disorder scales, the Impact of Events Scale–Revised, the Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale, and the PTSD scale of the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory–Ill, as well as a measure of child abuse and neglect, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. In this severely traumatized group, every scale of the Brief Symptom Inventory was significantly more elevated than the inpatient female norms, with the five most highly elevated scales being Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive, Anxiety, Interpersonal Sensitivity, and Psychoticism. Different indicators of trauma (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, PTSD scales, and PTSD diagnosis) show different patterns of relationships with the individual scales of the Brief Symptom Inventory. There is no simple relationship between trauma and BSI symptoms, but clinicians should consider severe interpersonal trauma to be one pathway to pervasively elevated profiles of the Brief Symptom Inventory.