"What researchers didn’t appreciate at the time was that the biggest group of PTSD sufferers is actually women, whose trauma symptoms are often precipitated by rape and abuse. In fact, physical and sexual violence explains the majority of PTSD in the U.S. population—more so than war, natural disasters, or the sudden death of a loved one. Among women who are raped, about half will develop PTSD. Over the course of a lifetime, 10 percent of women are diagnosed with PTSD, compared with 4 percent of men...
Two Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers—Karestan Chase Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology, and Andrea Roberts, research associate in the School’s Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences—have done groundbreaking studies on PTSD and the surprisingly prolonged effects of trauma generally. Koenen has linked trauma to a wide range of physical ailments and has explored the genetic underpinnings of PTSD. Roberts has demonstrated how the damage from trauma reverberates down the generations and has proposed biological mechanisms that could explain these striking cross-generational effects.
Both researchers hope that by understanding the roots of PTSD and erasing the onus that accompanies the diagnosis, they can help victims find relief sooner. For Koenen—herself a survivor of rape—the scientific challenge is also a personal quest...
One early analysis showed that after a rape, almost every woman had traumatic symptoms, including nightmares, depression, and sleeplessness—but that more than half recovered. The data further revealed that victims of trauma early in life, from sexual abuse to neighborhood violence, are more likely to suffer from PTSD after a later trauma. It’s as though they’ve been primed to be retraumatized, Koenen says...
Koenen and Roberts hope that the unmistakable links their data have uncovered—between mental health and physical health, trauma and chronic disease, a mother’s childhood abuse and her children’s well-being—will translate into policies that can prevent PTSD...
In the near term, Roberts would like to see primarycare doctors ask patients about their trauma history and then screen trauma-exposed women for heart disease, signs of stroke, diabetes, and weight-related disorders early to prevent problems down the road. “Obesity can be trauma-related,” she says, “but just telling people to change their diets without treating the underlying mental health issues is not going to solve the problem.”"
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