HOUSTON, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Psychological violence coming from an intimate partner can inflict health consequences as serious as physical or sexual violence, a new study released Thursday warns.
"We need to think beyond physical abuse. While physical abuse is very important, there are aspects of psychological abuse that clearly have a mental and perhaps physical health outcomes for both women and men," said lead author Ann L. Coker, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas at Houston School of Public Health.
"Keeping this abuse in the closet, or as a domestic or police issue, hasn't worked," Coker told United Press International.
The study, which appears in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is the first large-scale, population-based examination of health outcomes associated with both physical and psychological violence between intimate partners. Women and men subjected to abuses of power and control, even if not accompanied by physical or sexual abuse, were more likely to develop physical or mental illnesses or engage in substance abuse than people not abused, the study found.
Power and control violence was defined as not sharing financial control, intimidating behavior, unilaterally deciding to move the family or severely restricting social or work opportunities. Negative health impacts also were associated with verbal violence, such as being demeaned in front of others, shouted or sworn at or verbally provoked.
The study used data from the 1995 National Violence Against Women Survey, which interviewed 14,000 women and men and asked questions about physical and psychological violence and health status. It found 30 percent of women and 23 percent of men reported experiencing physical, sexual, or psychological intimate partner violence in their lifetimes.
About 18 percent of women and 6 percent of men reported being physically or sexually abused by a partner. Among those not abused physically or sexually, power and control abuses were experienced by about 7 percent of both men and women, and verbal abuse by 11 percent of men and 5 percent of women.
Both women and men who were victims of only power and control violence or of physical and sexual violence were about twice as likely to report poor health or depression as people who had not experienced these types of violence. Heavy alcohol abuse and increased use of tranquilizers, antidepressants and recreational drugs were reported among those suffering any of these abuses.
Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis and cancer, were three times as likely among women physically or sexually abused and among men subjected to power or control abuse, the study found. Chronic mental disease was about three times as likely in female victims of physical or sexual violence and twice as likely in men subjected only to verbal violence.
"This study will be valuable to physicians who counsel their patients about exposures that may be harming their health. Many abused women report psychological abuse is worse then physical abuse," Louise-Ann McNutt, associate professor of epidemiology in the school of public health at State University of New York at Albany told UPI.
"It is not surprising that men are affected by abuse," said Jacquelyn White, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "Unfortunately the data in this study were collected in such a way that one cannot tell which of the victimized men were also perpetrators. This complicates the understanding of health consequences for men," she said.
(Reported by Joe Grossman, UPI Science News, in Santa Cruz, Calif.)
