Differences between posttraumatic stress disorder patients with delayed and undelayed onsets.

In an effort to determine whether they differ from one another in important ways, the authors compared posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) victims who reported delayed onsets with those who claimed undelayed onsets of PTSD symptom self-ratings, MMPI clinical and validity scale scores, stress histories, and repression measures. The number and the sizes of the differences did not exceed chance expectations and did not support the establishment of separate delayed- and undelayed-onset PTSD categories in the diagnostic manual, nor did they support the hypotheses that the delay, when it appears, is attributable to the magnitude of the trauma, the severity of the symptoms, repression, or a limited stress history.