Psychological consequences of the 1999 earthquake in Turkey

Abstract

We explored the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its relation to demographic characteristics and other risk factors for developing PTSD in a large sample (N = 910) of earthquake survivors living in tent city. Twenty‐five percent of the sample met DSM‐IV criteria for PTSD assessed with the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Self Test (PTSD‐S). Peritraumatic factors explained the most variance when the risk factors were grouped as demographics, pretraumatic, peritraumatic, and posttraumatic. The study emphasized that PTSD among the earthquake victims was as prevalent in Turkey as after disasters in other developing countries but higher than usually found after disasters in developed countries, and there was a relation between some factors—mostly peritraumatic—and PTSD.