Psychiatric consequences of road traffic accidents.

Richard Mayou · Bridget Bryant · R B Duthie

626 citations0/0 files storedBMJ

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research Traffic and Road Safety Traumatic Brain Injury Research

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine the psychiatric consequences of being a road traffic accident victim. DESIGN: Follow up study of road accident victims for up to one year. SETTING: Emergency department of the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. SUBJECTS: 188 consecutive road accident victims aged 18-70 with multiple injuries (motorcycle or car) or whiplash neck injury, who had not been unconscious for more than 15 minutes, and who lived in the catchment area. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Present state examination "caseness"; post-traumatic stress disorder and travel anxiety; effects on driving and on being a passenger. RESULTS: Acute, moderately severe emotional distress was common. Almost one fifth of subjects, however, suffered from an acute stress syndrome characterised by mood disturbance and horrific memories of the accident. Anxiety and depression usually improved over the 12 months, though one tenth of patients had mood disorders at one year. In addition, specific post-traumatic symptoms were common. Post-traumatic stress disorder occurred during follow up in one tenth of patients, and phobic travel anxiety as a driver or passenger was more common and frequently disabling. Emotional disorder was associated with having pre-accident psychological or social problems and, in patients with multiple injuries, continuing medical complications. Post-traumatic syndromes were not associated with a neurotic predisposition but were strongly associated with horrific memories of the accident. They did not occur in subjects who had been briefly unconscious and were amnesic for the accident. Mental state at three months was highly predictive of mental state at one year. CONCLUSIONS: Psychiatric symptoms and disorder are frequent after major and less severe road accident injury. Post-traumatic symptoms are common and disabling. Early information and advice might reduce psychological distress and travel anxiety and contribute to road safety and assessing "nervous shock."

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 626 citations exist upstream.

References

1970Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory 1991Traumatic Events and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in an Urban Population of Young Adults 1992Epidemiology of trauma: Frequency and impact of different potentially traumatic events on different demographic groups.

Cited by

1995Maintenance of Intrusive Memories in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Cognitive Approach 2000Psychological debriefing for road traffic accident victims 1998The relationship between acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder: A prospective evaluation of motor vehicle accident survivors.1997Randomised controlled trial of psychological debriefing for victims of acute burn trauma 2000Dysfunctional meaning of posttraumatic intrusions in chronic PTSD 2002Posttraumatic stress disorder after motor vehicle accidents: 3-year follow-up of a prospective longitudinal study 2003PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS ASSOCIATED WITH SEVERE LOWER-LIMB INJURY 2002A controlled evaluation of cognitive behaviorial therapy for posttraumatic stress in motor vehicle accident survivors

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.