General Material
Published Date
January, 1994
Publisher(s)
The author provides a case study of her daughter’s sexual abuse as a child and subsequent experiences as a “chronically mentally ill” client in the mental health system. Information from 17 years of mental health records and anecdotal accounts are used to illustrate the effects of the abuse, her attempts to reach out for help, and the system’s failure to respond. There is evidence that a significant subset of psychiatric patients were severely sexually traumatized in childhood. Yet clients are often re-traumatized by current practices. Psychiatry’s historic resistance to addressing abuse as etiology is being challenged today by the emergence of a new trauma-based paradigm.
Associated Links
