An externally caused mental disorder was introduced into the state of the art of psychiatry and clinical psychology – a kind of scientific recognition, which has never been seen before in classification systems of mental disorders. The introduction of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Version III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) was a major milestone for the mental health field. The scholarly use of the new diagnosis has resulted in an increasing number of published studies on this topic in the diagnostic and therapeutic fields. The diagnosis is clinically easy to use in accordance with the WHO development goals for the ICD-11 and has shown good psychodiagnostic properties in various studies, including good discrimination from personality disorder with borderline pattern.

The CPTSD diagnosis comprises the core symptoms of the – newly, narrowly defined – PTSD diagnosis, the three symptom groups of affective, relationship, and self-concept changes. This paper provides a review of the historical lines of development that led to the CPTSD diagnosis, as well as the results since the ICD-11 publication in 2018. Thus, in a multi-stage process of ICD-11 development, the diagnosis of CPTSD was developed. This diagnosis has not been clinically influential, nor has it been subjected to much research. In the previous International Classification of Diseases, version 10 (ICD-10) issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), this symptom constellation was termed ‘enduring personality change after catastrophic experience’. The diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) was proposed several decades ago by scientist-practitioners, almost parallel to the first description of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Complex ptsd dsm 5 criteria