Intergeneration vulnerability to trauma

In the field of Psychiatry, the project carried out an exploratory research with the aim of studying the hypothesis of psychopathological vulnerability in families whose father took part in the Colonial War. 

Having reviewed and followed the literature on possible effects of war on the children of former soldiers, appropriate methods were adopted in order to detect the following: (i) possible biological traits of the intergenerational transmission of a vulnerability to trauma, detectable in a variation in levels of cortisol in the saliva and (ii) the transmission of potentially dysfunctional patterns of emotional behaviour, analysed using the following psychometric tests:

- Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI, by Derogatis, 1993);

- Adult Attachment Scale (AAS, by Collins and Read, 1990);

- Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ, by Bernstein and Fink, 1997);

- Post Traumatic Diagnosis Scale (PDS, by Foa et al, 1997);

- Impact Event Scale Revised (IES-r, by Weiss and Marmar, 1997);

- Young Schema Questionnaire (excerts) (YSQ, by Young, 1990).

The project has translated into Portuguese and tested three of these psychometric scales on the Portuguese population: Impact Event Scale Revised by Weiss and Marmar, 1997; Post Traumatic Diagnosis Scale, by Foa et al 1997; and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, by Bernstein and Fink, 1997.

Two groups stand out for the profound intergenerational traits which they transmit. One is the group of the children of desertors, whose biographical narrative show a close link with the political decision that led the father to leave the country. The second group are the children of men with post-traumatic stress disorder, who from childhood had to cope with and try to understand their father’s condition. Today, they are more susceptible to psychological and emotional problems.

The preliminary analysis of the database of the five aforementioned psychometric scales applied to the families participating in the data collection has shown evidence of significant variations in psychometric values in children of war veterans suffering from PTSD, and possible variations in the cortisol levels in this population, which require further in-depth study. The analysis of the interviews of offspring of veterans suffering from PTSD confirmed these data.