Impact of Abuse in Childhood on Psychological and Physical Health - Research Paper Example

?Kids who are exposed to verbal abuse for a long term have risk for personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood There is a well-established relationship between abuse experienced during childhood and adverse impact on psychological and physical health of an individual. Abuse experienced during childhood has both short-term and long-term negative effects on the health and life of an individual. It is rather unfortunate that in spite of the voluminous research drawing upon this relationship, it is not acknowledged quite frequently in the general medical literature. “The need for more visible research that will reach physicians who provide the bulk of front line health care is underscored by failure to give even passing mention to the well-documented link between adult depression and childhood abuse in a recent review on depression in the New England Journal of Medicine” (Springer et al). Although national guidelines issued over Depression in Primary Care in the year 1993 are other quite comprehensive (“Depression in Primary Care”), yet they do not discuss the significance of abuse experienced during childhood as a risk factor. Discussion of the relationship between childhood abuse and personality disorders is also omitted in a range of reviews done over anorexia nervosa, fibromyalgia, and functional somatic syndromes in different high-impact and prestigious medical journals in the recent years (Springer et al.). Lack of awareness of this relationship among physicians caring for adults suffering from an outcome of childhood abuse saps the physicians’ ability to make appropriate patient referrals and elicit an abuse history. Research providing evidence in favor of the long-term damages caused by sexual, emotional, and physical abuse on children has expanded in the recent years (“Understanding the effects”). The purpose of this paper is to present a broad overview of research that draws upon the relationship between childhood abuse and personality disorders and a range of other negative outcomes related to personality and behavior in general. One way in which maltreatment and abuse experienced during early stages in life alter the ability of an individual to positively relate to and interact with others is by alteration of the neurochemical balance inside the brain. Severe deprivation during childhood indicates that the ability of brain to use serotonin that plays a role in the production of feelings of emotional stability and well-being may be permanently altered as a result of such maltreatment (Healy). Brain of a child grows and develops as a result of their interaction with the environment and their ways of functioning within the environment. When infants’ cry bring them comfort and food in response, their neuronal pathways that teach them ways to get their needs addressed are strengthened emotionally as well as physically. Infants that do not get such responses to their cries and others that get abuse in response to their cries reach different conclusions as their neuronal pathways are strengthened and developed under adverse conditions (“Understanding the Effects”). Such a development of the neuronal pathways prepares such children to live and grow up in a negative environment, and their ability to respond to kindness, care, and nurturing is impaired. However, it is important to differentiate between childhood abuse and brief periods of predictable and moderate stress as the latter is not problematic. In fact, brief episodes of predictable and moderate stress prepare a child to deal with the world in a healthy way. The survival of body depends upon an individual’s ability to respond to stress. Children learn to handle moderate stress while developing positive relationships with their caregivers. A child’s ability to tolerate stress is increased when they receive care from a reliable adult that can serve as a buffer for the child. But when a child is exposed to prolonged, unpredictable, or severe stress that may include both neglect and abuse, it makes the experience of early childhood traumatic and problematic for the child particularly at later stages in life. This sort of toxic stress interferes with the development of brain, thus making negative impacts on the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth of a child. Children suffering from abuse may experience trauma in addition to direct physical damage. Most parents abuse their children because the culture of abuse is ingrained in their personal psychosocial development. Having been abused by their own parents in the past, these parents, consciously or subconsciously, approve of the use of abuse as a way to control their children. Most of such parents have learned that abuse is an essential part of parenting and that adequate control over children cannot be achieved unless abuse is used as a strategy. Having experienced abuse themselves during their own childhood, these parents are aware of the effects caused by such abuse on the mind and personality and expect to observe the same effects in their children. (Egeland and Susman-Stillman) compared a group of abused mothers that maltreated their children with a group of mothers that experienced abuse themselves during childhood but did not extend it to their own children in turn to check whether dissociative process plays a role in the transmission of maltreatment over the generations, and found the former to have higher ratings on inconsistency, idealization, and escapism in the way they described their childhood compared to the latter. (Egeland and Susman-Stillman) also found the first group of mothers to score higher over the scale of dissociative experience in comparison to the second group of mothers. Mothers that continued abuse in their children after experiencing it themselves as children were only able to recall the care received during childhood in a disconnected and fragmented way unlike mothers that chose not to extend abuse to their children who could recall the care received during childhood coherently. Verbal abuse experienced during childhood may be a causal factor in the development of certain sorts of personality disorders, independent of childhood physical abuse, offspring temperament, neglect, sexual abuse and a host of other psychiatric disorders. (Johnson et al.) studied the potential of childhood verbal abuse to increase the risk for personality disorders in an individual in adolescence and the early adulthood and found that likelihood of having narcissistic, borderline, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders is observed to be three times as much in children experiencing maternal verbal abuse during childhood as in children that never experience verbal abuse. (Johnson et al.) arrived at these associations after controlling for a range of other negative parental behaviors that included but were not limited to offspring temperament, physical punishment, sexual abuse, neglect, parental education, and childhood physical abuse. After accounted for the covariates, (Johnson et al.) found a similar tendency in youths that experienced verbal abuse during childhood to have increased symptom levels of narcissistic, borderline, schizoid, schizotypal, and paranoid personality disorders during adolescence as well as during early adulthood. Verbal abuse triggers the development of a negative personality. Abuse experiences during childhood in general and verbal abuse experienced during childhood in particular may, in part, converse the risk of development of internalizing disorders. This can be said because verbal abuse experienced during childhood instigates the development of a style of self-criticism. (Sachs-Ericsson et al.) studied the role of parental verbal abuse and self-criticism in the internalizing disorders among adults and found self-criticism rather than the dependency traits to completely mediate the relationship between internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety and childhood verbal abuse caused by parents. Self-criticism was found to only partly mediate the relationship between internalizing symptoms and other abuse types. Content that makes heart of verbal abuse is mostly criticism of the behaviors executed by a child by the parent. Continued experience of verbal abuse makes children conscious about the potential negative manifestations of those behaviors as they grow up. Childhood abuse not only induces self-criticism in an individual, but also makes the individual generally narrow-minded and pessimistic in their analysis of others in everyday life. These impairs such people’s ability to positively interact with others and develop lasting bonds and relationships with others. Abuse experienced during childhood not only increases an individual’s vulnerability to psychological disorders at later stages in life, but also influences the individual’s behavior and activities. (Landsford et al.) examined relationship between physical abuse experienced early in life and violent delinquency later in life and a range of other socially relevant consequences experienced during later stages in life and the role of child’s race and gender in the moderation of these relationships, and reached the conclusion that physical abuse experienced during the first five years of life increased the tendency of people to be arrested for status offenses during juvenility. The potential of the physically abused youth to graduate from high school was less compared with their nonabused counterparts. Other problems commonly experienced by abused children in their adolescence and early adulthood include but are not limited to teenage pregnancy, and termination from job. This research also highlighted the role of ethnicity and gender in depicting an abused children’s tendency to execute criminal behaviors at later stages in life. (Landsford et al.) found that African American adolescents and young adults were more likely to execute criminal or violent behaviors later in life after experiencing abuse during childhood in comparison to the European American youth. They also found that females were more likely to execute violent behaviors after having been abused during childhood compared to the males. There are a range of challenges in the identification of and adoption of appropriate measures to treat the long-term effects of childhood abuse. “This is especially troubling because conditions associated with childhood abuse are burdensome to both the patient and the health care system, relatively simple interventions may prove effective in alleviating much distress, only 2% to 5% of patients with a history of childhood sexual abuse will themselves report it to a physician, and managed care typically places the primary care physician as the gatekeeper controlling patient access to specialized services” (Springer et al.). In addition to these challenges, although a vast majority of the patients of personality disorders that have suffered from abuse during the childhood say that they want a screening for the history of abuse done by the physicians, yet such screening is done by very few physicians. While the relationship between childhood abuse and personality disorder development at later stages in life is evident in a lot of cases including the cases of criminals and otherwise, yet this relationship has been insufficiently discussed in the literature for a long time. More knowledge has been created with regard to this relationship in the past decade as a result of increased research on the causes of personality disorders. Children experiencing abuse focus the resources of their brains over survival as well as response to the risk factors in their environment. Such a chronic stimulation of the fear response of brains implies that the brain’s regions involved in response to the risk factors in their environment are activated frequently. Other regions of the brain like the ones engaged in abstract cognition and complex thought are activated less frequently, thus making a child less competent in processing such information. Abuse experienced during childhood reduces an individual’s tendency to recall care received during childhood particularly if such children as parents extend the abuse to their own children in turn. Childhood abuse exposes an individual to the risk of a range of personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood. Childhood abuse increases self-criticism which mediates adult internalizing disorders. Childhood abuse plays a decisive role in an individual’s general conduct and behavior at later stages in life. Many criminals are people who have experienced abuse during childhood. However, the tendency of childhood abuse to impact an individual’s behavior later in life varies from one ethnicity to another and between different genders that may be attributed to the various cultural influences and gender roles assigned by society. Managing the long-term personality and behavioral outcomes of childhood abuse is difficult because of a range of challenges. More research needs to be done in order to find effective treatment strategies for the adverse psychological and health outcomes of abuse experienced during childhood. Works Cited: “Depression in Primary Care.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Services, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR). Detection and Diagnosis: Clinical Practice Guideline. 1.5 (1993). Publication Number 93–0550. Egeland, Byron, and Susman Stillman, Amy. “Dissociation as a Mediator of Child Abuse across Generations.” Child Abuse & Neglect 20.11 (1996): 1123-132. Google scholar. Web. Healy, J. M. Your child's growing mind: Brain development and learning from birth to adolescence. New York: Broadway Books. 2004. Print. Johnson, J. G. et al. “Childhood Verbal Abuse and Risk for Personality Disorders during Adolescence and Early Adulthood.” Comprehensive Psychiatry 42.1 (2001): 16-23. Print. Landsford, Jennifer E. et al. “Early Physical Abuse and Later Violent Delinquency: A Prospective Longitudinal Study.” Child Maltreatment 12.3 (2007): 233-245. Sachs-Ericsson, Natalie et al. “Parental Verbal Abuse and the Mediating Role of Self-criticism in Adult Internalizing Disorders.” Journal of Affective Disorders 93.1-3 (2006): 71-78. Google Scholar. Web. Springer, Kristen W. et al. “The Long-term Health Outcomes of Childhood Abuse: An Overview and a Call to Action.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 18.10 (2003): 864-870. “Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Brain Development.” Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2009. Web. 29 Nov. 2013. . Read More