Emergency responders are exposed to potentially traumatic events in their line of work and as such, are at increased risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Little is known about ...the characteristics of trauma associated with PTSD symptoms in this population. This study analyzed the self-reported worst traumatic event on the PTSD checklist for DSM-5 for a sample of
N
= 610 emergency responders, working as police officers, paramedics, firefighters or search and rescue personnel. Sufficient information was available to code 98% (
N
= 603) participants' trauma; 84% (
N
= 509) met DSM-V criterion A trauma. Of the participants reporting criterion A trauma, 56.9% (
N
= 290) participants reported being most affected by a traumatic event that occurred in their personal lives, 41.5% (
N
= 211) participants reported being most affected by a work-related traumatic event and 1.6% (
N
= 8) reported criterion A events that were work-related and had occurred prior to their role as an emergency responder (e.g., combat). Paramedics were significantly more likely to report occupational trauma as their worst event whereas police officers, firefighters, and search and rescue workers reported personal trauma as their worst event. Personal trauma was associated with significantly greater PTSD symptom severity than occupational trauma. Emergency responders identifying as women were significantly more likely to report personal than work-related trauma as their index event and men were more likely to report work-related than personal trauma as being linked to their PTSD symptoms. The results underscore the need to consider the broader context of trauma in the emergence of PTSD symptoms in emergency workers.
Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social ...distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a collection of 35,108 tweets that have been curated from seven distinct domains of discourse and hand annotated by at least three trained annotators for 10 categories of moral sentiment. To facilitate investigations of annotator response dynamics, we also provide psychological and demographic metadata for each annotator. Finally, we report moral sentiment classification baselines for this corpus using a range of popular methodologies.
Patients presenting to emergency departments (EDs) after a nonfatal opioid-involved overdose are at high risk for future overdose and death. Responding to this risk, the New York City (NYC) ...Department of Health and Mental Hygiene operates the Relay initiative, which dispatches trained peer “Wellness Advocates” to meet patients in the ED after a suspected opioid-involved overdose and follow them for up to 90 days to provide support, education, referrals to treatment, and other resources using a harm reduction framework.
In this article, we describe the protocol for a multisite randomized controlled trial of Relay. Study participants are recruited from four NYC EDs and are randomized to receive the Relay intervention or site-directed care (the control arm). Outcomes are assessed through survey questionnaires conducted at 1-, 3-, and 6-months after the baseline visit, as well as through administrative health data. The primary outcome is the number of opioid-related adverse events, including any opioid-involved overdose or any other substance use-related ED visit, in the 12 months post-baseline. Secondary and exploratory outcomes will also be analyzed, as well as hypothesized mediators and moderators of Relay program effectiveness.
We present the protocol for a multisite randomized controlled trial of a peer-delivered OD prevention intervention in EDs. We describe how the study was designed to minimize disruption to routine ED operations, and how the study was implemented and adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04317053.
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