To Study the Prevalence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Comorbidity with personality disorders among veterans of Tehran

Introduction: Iran has experienced 8 years of holy defence and over 5000 veterans of the holy defence are living at the moment in Tehran, but there is no accurate information available on their mental health status. The present study aims to determine the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder in the veterans of Tehran city. Methodology: The research method has been devised as a “descriptive”, based on survey design. In order to perform the survey, 172 veterans from five districts of Tehran were selected by random cluster sampling.  The Mississippi traumatic stress scale and clinical questionnaire of Millon Clinical Multiaxial questionnaires 3 (MCMI-III) were utilized to analyze the data collected via Chi-square test.  Findings: The results suggested that the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder was 39%. The extent of their disability lower than 25% along with the education higher than bachelor degree was associated with a lower risk of this disorder. The most common personality disorder along with such disorder among the veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and the ones who did not have such disorder was Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) (17/9 % of them with the post-traumatic stress disorder, 4/8% of the veterans without such disorder). The prevalence of avoidant personality disorders (10.4% vs. 1.9%), affiliated (10.4% vs. 0%), and a pessimist (7.5% vs. 1.0%) were also found higher in the veterans with disorder compared to the other veterans. Conclusion: Post-traumatic stress disorder is high in the sacred defence veterans' population and its significant comorbidity with some personality disorders shows the necessity for an accurate assessment of these people’s mental health status.