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Yun and Woo: Childhood Abuse Experiences as Factors in Adult Psychiatric Illness: A Preliminary Study
Original Article

The Ewha Medical Journal 1994; 17(3): 205-212.

Published online: 30 September 1994

DOI: https://doi.org/10.12771/emj.1994.17.3.205

Childhood Abuse Experiences as Factors in Adult Psychiatric Illness: A Preliminary Study

Kyu Wol Yun, Haing Won Woo

Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Ewha Womans University, Korea.

Copyright © 1994. Ewha Womans University School of Medicine

(open-access):

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The authors explored childhood and later physical and sexual abuse experiences in 53 female psychiatric inpatients using objective measures.
All subjects were interviewed and administered the life experiences questionnaire and the SCL-90-R and obtained the data on diagnoses, suicidal symtoms and psychotropic medications.
Forty-two(79.2%) of the 53 women reported a history of abuse at some time during their lives. Thirty(56.6%) of them experienced abuse before age 16 and twelve(22.6%) of them experienced abuse at age 16 or later.
The most frequent perpetrators of physical abuse were family members(father before age 16, husband at age 16 or later). The most frequent perpetartors of sexual abuse were not family memebers(strangers before age 16, boy friend at age 16 or later).
The SCL-90-R scores from abused subjects before age 16 within the inpatient psychiatric norms(mean±SD=50±10), but the scores of interpersonal sensitivety, paranoid ideology, psychoticism, global severity index of SCL-90-R subjects.
The abused subjects before age 16 had more diagnoses of depression and schizophrenia and suicidal symptoms and they were given psychotropic medications more often.
Taken together, these findings suggest that childhood abuse experiences were correlated with severity of adult psychiatric symtoms.

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