Parental verbal abuse can be traumatising

Parental verbal aggression is likely to cause psychiatric problems in children in later life than physical abuse. Researchers from the Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, found that the consequences of verbal abuse should not be underestimated and careful attention should be given to the number of different types of traumatic experiences a child is exposed to, as this may be even more critical than the specific type of abuse. Previous studies have been primarily focused on physical or sexual abuse or the effects of witnessing domestic violence. But there has been little evidence about the long-term effects of suffering verbal abuse. To investigate the effect of parental verbal abuse, and compare it to the consequences of other types of abuse, the researchers collected information on psychiatric symptoms and abuse exposure from 554 peopole in the 18 to 22 years age group recruited through advertisements. The researchers looked at symptoms of a phenomenon known as limbic irritability, which include brief hallucinations and visual disturbances. These symptoms, similar to those experienced by people during a seizure, are dramatically influenced by a person's history of abuse. They also looked at dissociation, in which a person narrows his or her focus to block other aspects of experience, which can range from normal daydreaming to selective amnesia. The team divided abuse into five categories: emotional only (which could include verbal abuse as well as witnessing physical abuse of others), sexual only, physical only, or exposure to two or all three types of abuse. The effects on psychiatric symptoms for exposure to emotional abuse only were equal to those for people who suffered only sexual abuse or only physical abuse. Emotional abuse had a stronger effect on symptoms of dissociation than physical or sexual abuse, while people exposed to both verbal abuse and witnessing domestic violence showed more dissociation than those exposed to familial sexual abuse. Psychiatric symptoms increased with the number of types of abuse a person had experienced. Among people in the study who had experienced maltreatment, 59% had experienced more than one type. The findings raise the possibility that exposure to verbal aggression may be a stressor that affects the development of certain vulnerable brain regions in susceptible individuals, resulting in psychiatric consequences.