Original Article

Level of Dissociation and Histories of Reported Abuse among Women Psychiatric Outpatients

Jong-Won Kim
Author Information & Copyright
Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, Ewha Womans University, Korea.

Copyright ⓒ 1997. 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

Objectives

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dissociative levels and histories of reported abuse among women psychiatric outpatients.

Methods

The author observed the dissociative levels and histories of reported abuse of the 66 women outpatients who visited psychiatric clinics, and compare dissociative symptoms of women who reported the history of physical and sexual abuse and symptoms of the others who did not have such history.

Results

Results are as follows :

1) 54.5% of the other 66 outpatients of psychiatric clinic reported the history of abuse, including 13.6%, 24.2% and 16.7% of them reporting sexual abuse, physical abuse and physical and sexual abuse respectively.

2) Scores on the DES of abuse group was 18.6±16.3 which was significantly higher than DES of the non-abuse group(7.09±7.10).

3) Scores on the DES was highest in sexual abuse group, followed by physical abuse group and then physical and sexual abuse group. The percentile of score on the DES above 25 which was considered the score of dissociative disorder 44.4% of sexual abuse group, 18.8% of physical abuse group, 18.2% of physical and sexual abuse group, and 3.3% of non-abuse group.

4) Scores on the DES was variable according to the age of first abuse. It was highest in 7-11 years old group, followed by 12-16years old group, and then above 16years old group.

Conclusion

Sexual and physical abuse, especially sexual abuse, appears to be responsible for dissociation, or at least to ve a precipitating factor of dissociative experience.

Keywords: Sexual abuse; Physical abuse; Dissociation