4 Cases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Survivors from Sampoong Collapse

Young-Chul Kim, Haing-Won Woo

Copyright ⓒ 1996. Ewha Womans University School of Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jul 24, 2015

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder(PTSD), which has a life prevalence of 1%, can occur after expo-sure to a traumatic event that carries the risk of severe injury or death to itself.

The characteristic clinical features of PTSD are reexperiencing the events, increased arousal, and persistent avoidance or numbing of resposiveness. Authors reported that four survivors from Sampoong collapse suffered from symptoms of PTSD, guilty feeling, depressed mood, panic symptoms, claustrophobia, and suicidal threat since their injuries.

Interestingly, the psychotic symptom scale in self rating SCL-90-R(symptom checklist-90-revision) was somewhat high(>65)in three of them.

Keywords: Posttraumatic stress disorder; Survivors; Sampoong collapse