Victims of Violence and Psychiatric Illness

Authors: Elaine Hilberman Carmen Patricia Perri Rieker Trudy Mills

Publish Date: 1984

Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 199-211

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Abstract

The growing body of knowledge about victims of violence strongly suggests that physical and sexual abuse may be frequent if not inevitable life experiences for many people However psychological and social conditions that link such victimization to subsequent psychiatric illness have only recently been identified as subjects for clinical investigation As a result the importance of the victimtopatient process is neither appreciated by clinicians nor adequately conceptualized by researchers This lack of recognition persists in spite of an extensive but unsynthesized literature on the psychosocial consequences of child abuse spouse abuse rape and incest As a way of addressing this gap in our knowledge in this paper we report the results of an investigation into the relationship between physical and sexual abuse and psychiatric illness in a psychiatric inpatient population

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