Childhood abuse in adult women with unipolar depression seeking treatment at a tertiary care centre in India, compared to healthy women

Abstract

Introduction

Childhood abuse has been reported as a precursor and maintaining factors for adult psychiatric disorders. Childhood physical abuse, neglect and sexual abuse have been independently reported in women with depression. There is a serious dearth of literature on the incidence of childhood abuse among women with depression from India.

Objectives & aims

We investigated and compared the incidence of childhood abuse (overall) – physical, emotional and sexual (individual components)- among women seeking treatment for unipolar depression (UD) compared to healthy women (HW).

Methods

We compared the data of women diagnosed with UD (n = 134) from a larger pool of women seeking treatment for psychiatric disorders from our hospital (n = 609) with HW (n = 100) for the purpose of this study. The participants were screened using the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) and for childhood abuse using the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool - Retrospective (ICAST)-R. The incidence of childhood abuse between the two groups was compared using the Chi-squared test.

Results

The UD women have significantly more childhood emotional abuse than HW (69.5% vs 30.5%; χ² = 4.819, P < 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on overall abuse, physical or sexual abuse (all P > 0.16).

Conclusions

Consistent with world literature, significantly more childhood emotional abuse was seen among Indian women with UD compared to HW. It is likely that that repeated emotional abuse in childhood leads to negative attributions among children, later getting generalised to life events resulting in depression in adulthood.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.