The damage caused by child abuse
Mental health problems are often caused by childhood abuse, so raising awareness of mental health problems can help people recover and heal from such abuse. It has also been shown that survivors of abuse do sometimes become abusers, and that recovering from the own abuse is key to preventing this.
Common psychiatric diagnoses that often result from Child Abuse include Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder (which often has roots in emotional neglect) and Dissociative Disorders.
Why do people try to denying the damage?
This blog post raises awareness of Dr Joel Paris‘s attempt to dismiss Dissociative Disorders, which would both deny people treatment and reduce awareness of the abuse which cause the disorders.
His article suggested that one particular disorder – Dissociative Identity Disorder was a ‘fad’, despite it’s inclusion in the DSM psychiatric manual for several decades.
A letter in response to his article, written by specialists is Dissociative Disorders can be found http://eassurvey.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/growing-not-dwindling-worldwide-phenomenon-of-dissociative-disorders-disinformation-about-dissociation-dr-joel-pariss-notions-about-dissociative-identity-disorder/
What is the reality here?
I did some research and here are some simple figures from Google Scholar which show the number of articles (excluding patents) covering the two main dissociative disorders. Sadly Google Scholar only gives approximate numbers rather than exact ones, it says ‘About 193’ for instance. It all got rather complicated so here is the graph of the results looking at articles for each 5 year period since 1998.
- Academic articles found
Academic articles found
Basically, these results back of the findings of the letter I’m blogging about.
In the last 5 years 2,270 out of 3130 academic articles on “dissociative identity disorder” have also included abuse, over 70%, again refuting Dr Paris’s assumptions.
So I looked at the last 5 years of academic papers written by Joel Paris, 240 appeared, none of those on the first page had a heading with Dissociative or Dissociation in it. Search for “Joel Paris” Dissociative for the last five years gave only two results with Dissociative in the title – the letter I’m blogging about, and the original article.
Not exactly his key interest then.
Some explanation of using Google Scholar in my research…
“Dissociative Identity Disorder” found about 1,920 between 1990 and 2000, increasing to 5,320 articles between 2000 and 2010.
I thought this might be a bit of an unfair search since it used to be known as “Multiple Personality Disorder” and is still called them in the main international psychiatric manual, and was called that in the older versions of the DSM manual, so I searched for that term instead, and found about 4740 results between 1990 and 2000, and about 5840 results from 2000 to 2010 – so still an increase despite the term being rarely used now.
The next disorder in severity is known as “Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified” or DDNOS for short, so I searched for both terms separately (google scholar seems unable to search for either term). The results said shows 289 articles from 1990 to 2000, increasing to 510 articles between 2000 and 2010.
The DDNOS results from about 193 to 396 results over the same periods.
In the end I just went back and searched in 5 year periods, from 2013 backwards.
No matter how many ways I looked at the data the rise in diagnosis was clear, as was the number of articles now focused on treatment rather than questioning the evidence and cause of dissociative disorders.
Please share this to raise awareness of those working against child abuse awareness.
New Mexico
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