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Abstract
Specialized regional burn centers across the United States treat tens of thousands of patients annually. The psychological distress of enduring a burn injury is simultaneously a fundamental truth implicitly acknowledged across American culture and a nebulous, vexing clinical and research question. To be in a fire or an explosion is an easily cited example of a traumatic event that would meet diagnostic criteria for a traumatic response. Recent studies in generalized intensive care settings have also recognized the trauma of intensive medical treatment while research in burn intensive care settings has a longer running dialogue about the potential trauma of the hospitalization and treatment process. Both the general and burn intensive care research has called for efforts to assess patients’ psychological wellbeing at a multitude of time points than historically done. To that end, this study endeavors to take a primarily quantitative and a secondary qualitative snapshot of burn patients’ psychological functioning after they have left the hospital in order to explore for indicators of depression, trauma, and anxiety as they might be related to patient characteristics, injury details, and course of treatment experiences. While many will encounter trauma at some point in their lifespan, the experience of a burn injury has a particular journey through trauma. Critically, the most recent literature and national professional presentations call for the inquiry conducted in this dissertation to occur, importantly outside of and after the acute hospitalization in specialized burn care settings and across the adult lifespan, in order to begin to capture more fully the psychological experiences of burn survivors after injury. This study used Pearson coefficients for the quantitative analyses and LeCompte’s (2000) five step method for the qualitative data analyses. Results of the correlations revealed that scores on the Patient Health Questionnaire – 8 (PHQ-8), the PTSDS Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) were significantly and positively correlated with the Burn Specific Health Scale – Brief (BSHS-B), such that increased depression and anxiety were related to an increased sense that the burn injury negatively impacted ones’ experience. As evidenced by this study’s findings, burn survivors need researchers and providers to come together to better capture and understand this unique experience of trauma such that care and intervention can be targeted towards reducing the suffering from this trauma.
