How Child Abuse Primes the Brain for Mental Illness By Maia
Szalavitz Child maltreatment has been called the tobacco
industry of mental health. Much the way smoking directly causes
or triggers predispositions for physical disease, early abuse
may contribute to virtually all types of mental illness. Now, in
the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of
child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key
regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young
adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood. These
changes may leave victims more vulnerable to depression,
addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the study
suggests. Harvard researchers led by Dr. Martin Teicher studied
nearly 200 people aged 18 to 25, who were mainly middle class
and well-educated. They were recruited through newspaper and
transit ads for a study on “memories of childhood.” Because the
authors wanted to look specifically at the results of abuse and
neglect, people who had suffered oth