Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
摘要
Body identification is a vital task after a disaster wherein dentists compare the dental findings of dead bodies with antemortem dental records and X-rays to determine the identity of the deceased individuals. Body identification is extremely stressful in disaster medicine settings and can occasionally cause severe health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Katayama et al. 2012; Shigemura et al. 2018; Ursano and McCarroll 1990). Although dentists receive abundant requests for assistance in postmortem examinations and autopsies, they rarely come in contact with actual dead bodies during their routine medical care duties. Therefore, they are expected to experience stress associated with body identification (McCarroll et al. 1996). Many dentists employed for body identification work after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake faced mental health issues (Shigemura et al. 2018).