Emotional abuse -> brain changes

[Beth Benoit]

Title: Emotional abuse -> brain changes

I hope TIPSters will forgive my recent reliance on The Boston Globe as a primary source (I wouldn't accept it for a research paper!!), but I'm at home.  Actually I doubt that my school subscribes to Cerebrum, the journal mentioned in the following article.  But this topic is bound to cause some interesting talk in the future. Beth Benoit University of Massachusetts Lowell Gauging toll of abuse on a child's brain By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff, 12/15/2000   The harsh words, brutal beatings or sexual advances of a parent or adult family member might actually cause brain deformities in a child, a McLean Hospital researcher concludes in a paper released yesterday. The findings challenge the theory that all mental illness can be neatly divided into physical or emotionally based problems. The prevailing orthodoxy among psychiatrists holds that some conditions, like schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder, are caused by inherited chemical imbalances in the brain that can be treated by drugs. The other category is personality disorders, which stem from emotional trauma and can be dealt with through therapy. But the paper by Dr. Martin Teicher, director of McLean's developmental biopsychiatry research program, offers evidence that emotional trauma such as child abuse can actually cause adverse physical changes in the brain. The deformities, in turn, can cause depression, anxiety, and other conditions later in life, he found. ''The brain is fundamentally sculpted by our experiences. Adverse experience will sculpt our brain in a different way,'' he said. In the paper, which appears in the journal Cerebrum, Teicher focuses primarily on what he termed serious abuse cases involving sexual and physical assault. But in an interview, he talked about his other research, which finds similar initial results involving verbal abuse, an even more controversial assertion that challenges the time-honored parenting techniques of tongue-lashing and shaming. ''Verbal abuse may be just as damaging as sexual abuse. And it's very prevalent and something that a lot of people need to be concerned about,'' said Teicher. ''It's going to be interesting to see how this emerges over the next few years,'' he said, noting that he is still writing the first paper on the topic. ''But we are finding that verbal abuse is devastating.'' Teicher's paper describes the effect of child abuse on the ability of one hemisphere of the brain to communicate with the other. The major ''phone line'' between the left and right sides is called the corpus callosum. Teicher's team reviewed MRI brain scans, which show the corpus callosum of 51 abused children admitted to McLean, in Belmont. He compared them to MRIs from 97 healthy children. In the abused children, the corpus callosum, the mass of white, transverse fibers that connect the two sides, was smaller on average. In girls, sexual abuse shrunk the corpus callosum but neglect had no effect. In boys, the opposite was true. The result of a smaller corpus callosum can be that children can ''reside'' in one hemisphere of the brain, rather than shifting seamlessly between the two, as is typically found. This problem can linger into adulthood, causing anxiety and depression. ''A lot of individuals who have survived childhood trauma reside in their left hemisphere when they function well. But when traumatic thoughts arise, they retreat into their right,'' said Teicher. ''They can get very emotional, without any of the logic of the left side there to guide them.'' An early diagnosis of this sort of dysfunctionality might allow for treatment that would help the corpus callosum ''regrow,'' Teicher said. For instance, music therapy, such as intensive piano lessons, might help, said Teicher. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere, and the left hand by the right; coordinating them through piano playing could make hemispheric communication more efficient, according to the theory. Teicher also found that childhood abuse might cause arrested development in the left hemisphere and improper development of the portions of the brain that regulate emotions. Evidence that environmental stresses cause brain deformities was established in lab animals almost 50 years ago. But researchers were slow to test the hypothesis on humans. One stumbling block was in figuring out whether the abuse caused the deformities or the deformities made people more susceptible to abuse. New theories of mental illness follow a century of Freudian dominance, in which abuse was thought to lead to emotional wounds that could be dealt with in talk therapy. Then in the 1990s, scientists established that some mental illnesses were inherited, physical disorders. Quickly, all mental illnesses were forced into one of these two categories. Teicher still remembers the 1984 conference where he first introduced his idea that emotional trauma causes physical problems. ''They were curiously interested,'' he said, laughing. This story ran on page A8 of the Boston Globe on 12/15/2000. � Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.   [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ]   � � Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company  Extending our newspaper services to the web  Return to the home page of The Globe Online