Journal
NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Volume 4, Issue 8, Pages 811-818Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-0880-3
Keywords
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Funding
- National Institute of Justice [86-IJ-CX-0033, 89-IJ-CX-0007, 2011-WG-BX-0013]
- National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) [MH49467, MH58386]
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) [HD40774]
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) [DA17842, DA10060]
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) [AA09238, AA11108]
- National Institute on Aging (NIA) [AG058683]
- Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
- National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London
- Medical Research Council [P005918]
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In a cohort of 1,196 children followed to age 29 years, the authors found that risk of psychopathology was more strongly associated with subjective recall of childhood maltreatment histories than with objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment. Does psychopathology develop as a function of the objective or subjective experience of childhood maltreatment? To address this question, we studied a unique cohort of 1,196 children with both objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment and subjective reports of their childhood maltreatment histories made once they reached adulthood, along with extensive psychiatric assessment. We found that, even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures. These findings have important implications for how we study the mechanisms through which child maltreatment affects mental health and how we prevent or treat maltreatment-related psychopathology. Interventions for psychopathology associated with childhood maltreatment can benefit from deeper understanding of the subjective experience.
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