Original Article

Psychiatrics Symptoms in Adult Inpatients with Childhood Histories of Sexual Abuse

Kyu Wol Yun, Haing Won Woo
Author Information & Copyright
Department of Psychiatry, Ewha Medical Research Center, College of Medicine, Ewha Womans University, Korea.

Copyright ⓒ 1996. Ewha Womans University School of Medicine. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jul 24, 2015

Abstract

Objective

This study investigated the correlations between childhood sexual abuse and the severity of psychopathology symptoms in adulthood and the usefulness of adult psychiatric symptoms, diagnoses, and medications as factors in the identification of patients who have been sexually abused in childhood.

Method

The subject of this study were 21 childhood sexually abused female inpatients and 22 nonabused female inpatients(psychiatric control group). All subjects were interviewed and completed self report instruments that focused of childhood sexual histoy of trauma, and current general psychiatric symptoms, dissociative symptoms.

Results

Sexually abused broup showed significantly higher rates of divorce than psychiatric control group. Relative to psychiatric control group, sexually abused group have more hospitalization, higher proportion of more suicidal symptoms and more often major pharmacological tratment. Sexually abused group manifested significantly higher levels of dissociative symptoms and general psychiatric symptoms, including interpersonal sensitivity, psychoticism, obsessive compulsive and global severity index.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that childhood sexual abuse is associated with adult psychiatric symptoms, especially dissociative symptoms and work as etiology of psychopathology of boderline personalitiy disorder.

Keywords: Childhood sexual abuse; General psychiatric symptoms; Dissociative symptoms; Boderline personality disorder