The purpose of the work is to determine the relationships between acute stress reaction (ASR) and acute stress disorder (AST) and to study the internal structure of the process of responding to a stressful event (SE) using the example of patients of psychiatric, neurological and neurosurgical profiles who were treated in the front-line city of Kharkiv.

During 2024—2025, 1360 people were examined, including 1129 civilians (804 men and 325 women) and 231 military personnel (226 men and 5 women), who were admitted for treatment to the psychiatric department of the Military Medical Clinical Center of the Northern Region of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (Kharkiv), as well as to the psychiatric, neurological and neurosurgical departments of the State Institution "P. V. Voloshyn Institute of Neurology, Psychiatry and Narcology of the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine".

The main research instruments were the questionnaire of the international research consortium GENAHTO (Gender, Alcohol, and Harms to Others). The obtained data were processed by methods of mathematical statistics (variance, correlation and regression analysis) on a computer using Excel 2016 computational tables (with the Data Analysis package).

It was found that the complete distribution of all surveyed individuals by the sum of SASRQ scores is polymodal, which indicates the heterogeneity of this contingent in terms of the severity of response to SE; and also, that this distribution is correctly described by the sum of three monomodal distributions which correspond to homogeneous groups of subjects selected based on the use of DSM-5 diagnostic criteria ("Without ASR", "ASR" and "AST"). In addition, structural differences in symptomatology were found in respondents with different severity of response to SE, which manifested themselves in a higher specific weight of dissociative symptoms and a lower specific weight of hyperarousal symptoms in respondents from the AST group (compared to respondents from the ASR group). It was concluded that the above circumstances allow us to consider ASR and AST not simply different gradations in the continuum of response of surveyed individuals to SE, but qualitatively different states.