Childhood maltreatment, positive childhood experiences, and suicidal ideation in emerging adults: The roles of complex posttraumatic stress symptom trajectories.

Abstract

Objective: Childhood maltreatment (CM) survivors in emerging adulthood are at risk for suicidal ideation, with complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) symptoms potentially mediating this relationship. However, few previous studies concurrently considered protective factors such as positive childhood experiences (PCEs) or employed longitudinal designs to explore the development of CPTSD symptoms. This study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectories of CPTSD symptoms and examine their mediating roles between CM/PCEs and suicidal ideation.

Method: We conducted a four-wave study with 1,776 Chinese emerging adults who experienced CM (935 [52.6%] females; 1,135 [63.9%] ≤ 18 years old). We utilized parallel process growth mixture modeling to identify heterogeneous trajectories of CPTSD symptoms and adopted structural equation modeling to examine their mediating roles between CM/PCEs and suicidal ideation.

Results: We identified five CPTSD symptom trajectories: resilient, recovery, delayed, high disturbances in self-organization, and chronic. Additionally, emotional abuse showed a positive indirect association with suicidal ideation via CPTSD symptom trajectories, while PCEs showed a negative indirect association with suicidal ideation via CPTSD symptom trajectories.

Conclusions: The development of CPTSD symptoms can be heterogeneous among emerging adult CM survivors. Moreover, heterogeneous CPTSD symptom trajectories can be the mechanism between emotional abuse/PCEs and suicidal ideation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).