Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder prevalence and comorbidity in humanitarian aid workers exposed to intentional human-made catastrophes: a quantitative research

Abstract

Research on humanitarian aid workers (HAWs) deployed to intentional human-made catastrophe contexts—such as armed conflicts—is scarce and seldom grounded in systematic theoretical frameworks, leaving psychopathological comorbidity largely unexamined. Guided by the p Factor and Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology frameworks, we assessed anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder symptom caseness in HAWs ( N = 432) using validated self-report instruments and hierarchical log-linear modeling. Symptom co-occurrence exceeded statistical independence, pairwise association strengths differed by spectrum, and comorbidity patterns deviated from chance distributions. These results are consistent with transdiagnostic clustering of psychopathology under extreme stress, supporting integrated approaches in humanitarian contexts.