Expertises

Psychological trauma, including the spectrum of different trauma-related reactions like:  PTSD, Complex PTSD, dissociation, and personality disorders.

Special expertise in refugee and childhood trauma.

Statistical methodology: mixture models and psychometrics (including IRT and network-models) 

Main research areas

Complex PTSD/DESNOS/CPTSD in traumatized refugees

evidence based treatment individualization for traumatized refugees 

Current research

Danish Database on Refugees with Trauma (DART) -

Improving mental health care for trauma-affected refugees

Based on 7 years of research on treatment effect, the Competence Centre for Transcultural Psychiatry (CTP) has built the Danish Database on Refugees with Trauma (DART), which is unique in scale and representativeness of the clinical population of trauma-affected refugees in the West. Years of research in representative clinical populations have shown that the treatment effect is quite modest both with drug- and psychotherapy. Identification of those trauma-affected refugees who do not respond to standardized treatment, is currently not possible, as there are few studies of treatment outcome predictors in the group. This project applies the DART in concert with state- of- art statistical methodology, in order to identify subgroups of trauma-affected refugees with different patterns of treatment response. The aim is to identify which treatment elements work for whom, and what characterizes the subgroup of non-responders. This study is the first step towards personaliz-ing of treatment for trauma-affected refugees and improving targeting to  different patient sub-groups. 

Potential conflicts of interest

None.