A typology of psychiatric reactions to motor vehicle accidents

Perhaps owing to their commonness, nonserious motor vehicle accidents, i.e. those not resulting in death or major bodily injury, have received scant systematic study in the psychiatric literature. However, patients presenting with lingering psychiatric distress following such accidents are seen commonly in practice. The authors reviewed the patterns of presentation and background circumstances in a series of 55 such cases, presenting at varying periods of time after the incident. They found such patients to cluster into four distinct groups. The most common presentation was that of a depressive syndrome, outnumbering those with features of posttraumatic stress disorder by 3:1.