14 DAY TRIAL // Women suffering from severe mental illnesses are more likely to have suffered abuse in their early years of life, as opposed to the general population, during childhood or as teens, a new research presented by experts at King's College London Institute of Psychiatry shows. Published in the April issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, the paper shows that the same association does not apply to men who suffered abuses when they were young.
For the new study, experts at the Institute formed two test groups, with volunteers aged between 16 and 64, all coming from areas around London and Nottingham, in the United Kingdom. Those in the first one experienced mental illness symptoms such as hallucinations, mania, or schizophrenia, while those in the second group showed none of the above and were therefore constituted in a control group. All of the participants received questionnaires in which they were asked if they had suffered physical or sexual abuses during their childhood or in their teen years.
According to the results of the investigation, women in the first group were twice more likely to report having suffered at least one form of abuse in their lives than those in the control population. One of the explanation scientists have come up with for this intriguing association is the fact that girls have the tendency to “internalize” their problems and to intentionally refuse to discuss their issues with others.
Thus, they become separated from the rest of the society and expose themselves to higher risks of developing symptoms such as paranoid delusions or mania later in their life. Young boys seldom go through the same internal processes, and are therefore more likely to fit into society and put the past behind them. As a direct result, their mental health remains strong and they do not suffer the same conditions that plague abused women.
“These findings do not mean that if a child is abused they will develop psychosis; but women with such disorders are more likely to reveal a background which included childhood abuse. These findings point to the need for gender-specific interventions for abused children to prevent later mental health and behavioral problems,” Institute of Psychiatry psychosis researcher Helen Fisher, who has also been the lead author of the BJP paper, explains.
“We also know that there are psychological, biological and genetic factors that may contribute to this condition in women and more attention needs to be given to understanding how adult psychosis develops. Excitingly, we have just been awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to repeat this original study on a larger scale to enable us to investigate the factors involved in this link between childhood abuse and psychotic disorders,” she concludes.