Els van Meijel

90 Chapter 5 | Parental posttraumatic stress Psychotherapy Of the total group of 13 parents with PTSS at T1, 9 did not participate at T2. Of the remaining 4 parents with PTSS at T1, 1 parent still reported PTSS at T2 and 3 did not. The parent with PTSS at both T1 and T2 did not want any type of psychotherapy. She believed the symptoms would disappear over time. Of the 3 parents that no longer reported PTSS at T2, 1 still reported symptoms and distress but at a lower level. This parent started Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) but did not finish it due to a mismatch with the therapist. The parent was willing to start EMDR again. The second parent successfully finished EMDR. The third parent did not want to be interviewed and only filled out the parent questionnaire, so it is unknown whether this parent received psychotherapy or not. The 3 parents that developed PTSS between T1 and T2 reported no need for psychotherapy. The first of these parents said that she didn’t need help and she would rather wait for recovery. If necessary, she would contact us at a later stage. The second parent said that she didn’t need trauma-focused therapy because she was already receiving general support from a social worker. The third parent stated that she didn’t need therapy because she only felt sad when talking about the accident. Discussion The long-term prevalence of parental PTSS (5.8%) that we found in our study differs from the findings of previous studies on parental posttraumatic stress. Bronner and colleagues studied parental PTSD in parents 9 months after unexpected pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) treatment of their child (Bronner et al., 2010). The prevalence of clinical PTSD in their study was 10.5%. This percentage did not change over time, and posttraumatic stress responses at 3 months predicted subclinical and clinical PTSD at follow-up. Bakker et al. (2010) studied maternal PTSS in children 1 and 11 years after a burn event of their child. Although mean total stress scores decreased significantly over time, 17% of the mothers reported clinically significant stress at both 1 year and 11 years after the burn event. There are several possible explanations for the discrepancy in findings with our study, such as the use of different questionnaires (Bronner et al., 2010), different follow-up periods and different study populations. Furthermore, the majority of parents with PTSS at 3 months after the accident (9 out of 13) did not participate in the follow-up. If all 13 parents had participated in the