ASSESSMENT OF EARLY TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES IN ADULTS

The presence of early traumatic experiences has been associated with a variety of psychiatric disorders in adulthood. This means that in clinical practice the assessment of and approach to previous traumatic events is important in patients with different mental disorders. The main purpose of this paper is, firstly, to provide a brief description and approximation of the main measurement instruments for the assessment of early traumatic experiences; and secondly to present the new self-report for the assessment of early traumatic experiences in patients with severe mental illness. The results show that most of the existing tools for assessing early traumatic experiences have little or no psychometric support and a number of instruments are designed to measure only one type of trauma, which reduces their clinical applicability. Similarly, there are few instruments that have been adapted to and validated in the Spanish population. Future studies should continue to examine the psychometric properties of this group of self-reports with the aim of improving the evaluation of early traumatic experiences in adulthood.