TUESDAY, August 2, 2011 (Health.com) — Women are drastically more likely to develop a mental disorder at some point in their lives if they have been the victim of rape, sexual assault, stalking, or intimate-partner violence, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
While the connection between these harrowing experiences and poor mental health is hardly surprising, experts say the new findings highlight just how strongly the two problems are intertwined—and how important it is for doctors and other health-care workers to ask women about past episodes of violence, even if they happened years ago.
“When professionals are treating women with depression or mental health issues, it’s best to be clued in to the fact that violence might be behind [it],” says Andrea Gielen, Sc.D., director for the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study.
Researchers in Australia analyzed health data from a nationally representative sample of Australian women between the ages of 16 and 85. Episodes of sexual assault, stalking, and other “gender-based violence” were all too common, with 27% of the group reporting at least one episode of abuse.
Fifty-seven percent of the women with a history of abuse also had a history of depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, or anxiety (including panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder), versus 28% of the women who had not experienced gender-based violence.
Among women who had been exposed to at least three different types of violence, the rate of mental disorders or substance abuse rose to 89%.
“The extent and strength of the association we found was surprising and very concerning,” says lead author Susan Rees, PhD, a senior research fellow in psychiatry at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.
Rees and her colleagues can’t say for sure whether the mental health problems in the study were triggered by the violence, or whether women with preexisting mental health issues were more likely to experience violence. (They did, however, control for a range of potential mitigating factors, including socioeconomic status and a family history of psychiatric problems.)
But there is “ample evidence” that traumatic events—especially interpersonal traumatic events, such as domestic abuse—can trigger mental problems, Rees says. Moreover, she adds, episodes of gender-based violence often occur very early in life, whereas mental disorders often don’t surface until years later.
Next page: A major public health concern
