Child sexual abuse experiences mediate the relationship between poverty and posttraumatic stress disorder

There is a growing body of evidence from developing countries which suggests there is an association between poverty and risk of common mental disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Patel & Kleinman,2003). With respect to the mechanisms underlying this relationship, it is far from clear whether poverty exerts a direct influence on PTSD outcomes (i.e., over and above individual factors such as trauma exposure) as suggested by some researchers (Rockers, Kruk, Saydee, Varpilah, & Galea, 2010) or poverty is a riskfactor for traumatic experiences (Townsend & Dawes, 2004), with such traumatic experiences in turn serving as determinants of PTSD.