Washington, May 22 (Inditop) Being abused in childhood can have damaging outcomes for the victim throughout his or her life, leading to more suicide attempts, prevalence of substance use disorder and proneness to personality disorders.
These victims also had an earlier onset of mental illness and an increase in psychiatric hospitalisations, said a Mayo Clinic study.
Child abuse is already known to increase the risk of suicide. However information about other characteristics of depressed child abuse victims is scarce.
Although the findings of the Mayo study do not confirm a cause-effect link, the study stresses the importance of more aggressive approaches from the public health perspective to prevent child abuse.
“A history of child abuse makes most psychiatric illnesses worse,” according to Magdalena Romanowicz, lead author of the study.
This new information serves as a reminder of the importance of child abuse prevention from a public health perspective, Romanowicz added.
The study was presented at a recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in San Francisco.