Childhood emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and diagnoses of depressive and anxiety disorders in adult psychiatric outpatients

TLDR

Childhood abuse has been theorized to contribute to adult psychopathology, but the specificity of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse to particular disorders remains unclear. The study tested whether reports of childhood emotional abuse are specifically associated with depression diagnoses in adult psychiatric outpatients. Results showed that childhood emotional abuse was more strongly linked to major depression than to physical or sexual abuse, a pattern also seen in social phobia, and that depression patients reported similar abuse levels to social phobia but less than those with PTSD.

Abstract

Although a number of theorists have hypothesized a link between negative experiences during childhood (e.g., abuse) and the presence of psychopathology in adults, little is known about the relative specificity of childhood emotional, physical, or sexual abuse to different forms of psychopathology. In this study, we hypothesized that adult psychiatric outpatients' reports of childhood emotional abuse would exhibit a specific relationship with diagnoses of depression. Analyses partially supported our hypothesis. Specifically, diagnoses of major depression were significantly more strongly related to reports of childhood emotional abuse than to physical or sexual abuse. However, the same effect was observed for social phobia. In addition, patients with major depression reported equivalent levels of childhood emotional abuse as patients with social phobia, but lower levels of emotional abuse than those with posttraumatic stress disorder.