What haunts abused children? Memory, study findings

A study of adults who were abused as children found that those who did not remember had fewer psychological sequelae.

For generations, our society has debated on the best way to heal people who have experienced terrible things in childhood.

Should these memories be dug up, allowing their destructive power to dissipate? Should they be gently molded into something less painful? Or should they remain intact?

Researchers from King's College London and the City University of New York have examined this conundrum by conducting an unusual experiment.< /p>

Researchers surveyed a group of 1,196 American adults repeatedly for 15 years about their levels of anxiety and depression. Unbeknownst to the subjects, 665 of them had been selected because court records showed they had suffered abuse such as physical abuse, sexual abuse or neglect before the age of 12.

Not all of them though, told researchers they had been abused, and that was linked to a big difference. according to the study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry. The 252 subjects who said they had been abused without evidence of court records also had higher levels.

But the 173 subjects who did not say they had been abused, despite court records that show it happened, had no more distress than the general population.

The findings suggest that how the People frame and interpret the events of their early childhood powerfully shape their mental health in adulthood, said Dr. Andrea Danese, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at King's College London and one of the study's co-authors.

"This almost comes down to the stoic message what you experience," he said. "If you can change the way you interpret experience, if you feel more in control right now, then it's something that can improve longer-term mental health."

In a meta-analysis of 16 studies on child abuse published in 2019, Dr. Danese and colleagues found that 52% of people with a history of child maltreatment did not report it in interviews with researchers, and 56% of those who did did not. 'abuse.

Part of this discrepancy could be due to measurement issues - court records may not have all of the history of abuse - and may also reflect this Self-reporting of abuse is influenced by a person's levels of anxiety and depression, Dr. Danese said. reasons why others might misinterpret some of the experiences as neglect or abuse,” he said. a documented history of being abused but not reporting it - because they had no memory of the events, interpreted them differently, or chose not to share those memories with investigators - seemed more sane.< /p>

"If the meaning you give to these experiences is not central to how you remember your childhood, then you don't feel of needing to report it, then you're more likely to have better mental health over time," he said. .

Traumatic childhood experiences have been the subject of some of the fiercest battles in psychiatry. Sigmund Freud postulated early in his career that many of his patients' behaviors indicated a history of childhood sexual abuse, but later backtracked, attributing them to subconscious desires.

In the 1980s and 1990s, therapists used techniques like hypnosis and age regression to help...