PTSD Symptoms Among College Students: Linkages with Familial Risk, Borderline Personality, and Sexual Assault

ABSTRACT

College students have high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms as well as high rates of sexual assault. What is less clear, however, is whether different sexual assault types (e.g. coercive, physically forced, and incapacitation) are associated with greater PTSD symptoms. Moreover, understanding early familial and mental health histories of college students is important for explaining PTSD symptoms. As such, we use a social stress framework to examine the relationships between early familial risk (i.e. child abuse, perceived maternal rejection), borderline personality (BP) symptoms, and three sexual assault types with PTSD symptoms among college students. A total of 783 undergraduate students (65.4% female) completed paper and pencil surveys in fall 2019 and spring 2020 at a large public university. Results revealed that females were more likely to experience child sexual abuse and all three forms of sexual assault, while males experienced higher rates of child physical abuse. OLS regression results showed positive associations between child sexual abuse, perceived maternal rejection, BP symptoms and all three types of sexual assault with PTSD symptoms. Females also experienced more PTSD symptoms compared to males. Findings have implications for targeted interventions to improve mental health outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• child abuse
• undergraduates
• sexual assault types

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human subjects research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all participants for being included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this research paper was partially supported by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Programs of Excellence funds.

Notes on contributors

Kimberly A. Tyler

Kimberly A. Tyler is George Holmes University Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Co-Director of the Longitudinal Networks Core, Rural Drug Addiction Research Center in Lincoln, NE.

Colleen M. Ray

Colleen M. Ray is in the Division of Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA.