For hundreds of years, the human response to personal and collective catastrophe has been recognized. Major historical events of the twen tieth century have highlighted the reality of the human response to extreme traumatization, especially the experience of persons exposed to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unique features of the Vietnam conflict. However, it was not until1980, with the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-111), that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was...

While insights sometimes are slow in coming, they often seem obvious when they finally arrive. This handbook is an outcome of the insight that the topics of social support and the family are very closely linked. Obvious as this might seem, the fact remains that the literatures dealing with social support and the family have been deceptively separate and distinct. For example, work on social support began in the 1970s with the accumulation of evidence that social ties and social integration play important roles in health and personal adjustment. Even though family members are often the key...