Julie, I answered the Edinburgh Depression scale a million times and none of the questions on it even remotely identify whether there has been a trauma experienced, hence my PTSD went undiagnosed until about 2 years later when a GP named it.

The things that indicate the trauma to me was - the inability to recall large chunks of what happened (I literally blanked it out for several months), and also a total dissociation from my body from the waist down (I was literally unable to touch myself for weeks afterwards). There was also a weird time thing where I stopped being able to track time at all, even something simple like eating a sandwich would take nearly an hour and I'd have no idea that much time had passed. The biggie though, was once I finally came out of denial, I remembered that I'd left my body and gone to a place of death and had to chose whether to live or not. Whether or not this actually happened (and the Dr I saw last week happily labelled it a psychotic episode to fit his own world view) the important thing about this event was that I believed that I wasn't going to make it out of there alive. When I finally told a few ppl about my experience, several of them sort of laughed at me, like how could that possibly be. So I'm not really sure how you would go building questions that cover the entire spectrum of "normal" debriefing right through to the really severe cases.

BTW, my baby was three days old before any of the nursing staff asked me how I was feeling. I had already identified a previous instance of reactive depression (at my admittance interview) so god only knows what deficit in care was going on at that hospital.