Developmental Trauma Disorder: Recognizing trauma beyond PTSD

Modern trauma frameworks appropriately recognize trauma responses often attributed to psychiatric disorders other than post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), among others. However, the regular practice of applying multiple distinct co‐morbid diagnoses to traumatized children risks limiting trauma‐­informed treatment to the small fraction of youth who meet the narrow criteria for PTSD (Ford, 2023).