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W I T H O U T M A S K
Link Between Schizophrenia And Child Abuse Investigated
This article was written from information found in a transcript of an interview broadcast on Wednesday, May 23, 2001 6:40 PM at 1800 AEST local radio, New Zealand
Dr. John Reid, a New Zealand psychologist from the University of Auckland, made the announcement at a Canberra conference that he has found that 60% of women and 50% of men with a schizophrenia may have been abused as children. He is now a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Auckland University and he says that his own clinical experiences and information he has studied from international reports convinces him there is definately a link between child abuse and schizphrenia. He says, "We do know now that the brains of traumatised children … show quite significant dysfunction and structural change - particularly a heightened sensitivity to stress, not surprisingly. And what's interesting to us is that most of the biological factors that are found in the brains of adult schizophrenics are there almost identically in the brains of traumatised children."
This goes contrary to the current theory that the schizophrenias are biological in origin. However, Tracey May says he is right on when he says, ". . . we're finding quite often that the voices people (schizophrenics) are hearing, which are taken as a sign of illness, are actually the voices of the perpetrators of the abuse . . . ." During her healing process Tracey eventually was able to identify the source of the voices that plagued her, to accept that she had been abused, and to move on. Since she has done that the voices no longer plague her. And so far, she has not met a schizophrenic who was not abused.
© Sandra Kelsey 2001
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