Abusive and Ill?

December 24, 2008 8:46 PM

I know that survivors of abuse often develop mental disorders. But what disorders/illnesses are associated with being abusive?

Answering for any type of abuse is fine, although I'm mostly interested in understanding the factors behind physical/emotional child abuse.

posted by acidic to human relations (20 comments total)

Borderline Personality Disorder, to name one. PTSD to name another, and in this case, it applies to both. But remember, abusers are often (usually?) victims of abuse.
posted by Goofyy at 9:22 PM on December 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Addiction.
posted by The Straightener at 9:24 PM on December 24, 2008

Antisocial Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia, depression, or manic depression might contribute to abuse to get you started if you are looking for research material.
posted by Silvertree at 9:27 PM on December 24, 2008

Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but at what point do we stop rattling off items from the relevant lists? The question feels very broad.
posted by Submiqent at 9:30 PM on December 24, 2008

There is quite a large literature on this topic. If you search for the following terms: risk factors child maltreatment . You'll find lots of articles.

Here's a quote from the abstract for the article Child maltreatment in the "children of the nineties" a longitudinal study of parental risk factors published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect. 2001 Sep;25(9):1177-200.

. . . significant risk factors within the mothers' backgrounds were:

• age <> • lower educational achievement;
• history of sexual abuse;
• child guidance or psychiatry;
• absence of her father during childhood;
• and a previous history of psychiatric illness.

Significant factors in the fathers' backgrounds were:
• age <> • lower educational achievement;
• having been in care during childhood;
• and a history of psychiatric illness.

Significant factors on univariate, but not multivariate analysis included:
• a parental history of childhood physical abuse;
• divorce or separation of the mother's parents;
• a maternal history of having been in care, or separated from her mother;
• parental alcohol or drug abuse;
• and a maternal history of depression.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 9:39 PM on December 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

That should be age less than 20 as a risk factor for both mothers and father in my post above.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 9:42 PM on December 24, 2008

absence of her father during childhood;

• and a previous history of psychiatric illness.
divorce or separation of the mother's parents;

• a maternal history of having been in care, or separated from her mother;

• parental alcohol or drug abuse;

• and a maternal history of depression.

That's so in line with my experience.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:51 PM on December 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks, everyone. I guess this question definitely is too broad. So why isn't "abusive" considered a standard symptom of the disorders listed above, or why has psychiatry categorized itself or developed in such a way? It seems to me that abusive-ness would be one of the most clear-cut and significant symptoms, right?
posted by acidic at 9:52 PM on December 24, 2008

From personal experience, bpd, like above. But please remember, for whatever reason you are asking, most people wit bad are not abusive. Abuse is not a symptom. It's a behavior. It's a choice.
posted by Pax at 9:55 PM on December 24, 2008

My experience is that much of the abuse is driven by a desire to avoid the pain of the disorders above.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:04 PM on December 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Hmm, I see. Does anyone know of good resources or literature on abusers with BPD? Or living with such people? Google is failing me because I'm only finding things saying that BPD can be a result of abuse. Relevant and probably true in this case, but not exactly the angle I'm curious about.
posted by acidic at 10:21 PM on December 24, 2008

So many disorders can cause people to become abusive. The term "abuse" is too broad to fit into a definitive diagnosis, as you can see. The diagnosis must be concise enough to include all of the relevant behaviors yet broad enough to apply to a specific subset of people. So terms that are too broad, like "abuse" really don't do much to describe the specific disorder.

For example, someone who has Antisocial Personality Disorder and someone who has Schizophrenia are going to exhibit completely different signs, symptoms, and behaviors. Using "abusive" does nothing to categorize these disorders. Does that help?
posted by Silvertree at 10:33 PM on December 24, 2008

What question are you really trying to ask? Are you trying to deal with a person in your life who is bpd and an abuser? Are you worried that someone who is bpd might be an abuser? Are you looking for practical advice on dealing with them or academic research about correlations?
posted by metahawk at 10:59 PM on December 24, 2008

The book about domestic violence by Lundy Bancroft that was recommended in the last abuse thread did turn out to be good. It might give you some insight into what you're trying to figure out. It's not about child abuse, but it discusses the various characteristics of abusive behavior.

He claims that most abusers are psychologically "normal" and that most abuse stems from beliefs, attitudes, expectations, and thoughts ("The man has to be the head of the household." "Spare the rod and spoil the child.") and grow from there rather logically, though with terrible impacts.

Bancroft says the more extreme manifestations of abuse do correlate with mental illness, but that's not because the illness is causing the abuse; it's because, say, the depression makes someone think "who cares if I go to jail?" so he might get more violent.

Best of luck with whatever you're dealing with. There are a lot of resources about living with someone with BPD online, including a past AskMe thread. But if what you're really trying to understand is abuse, I would read about abuse. I wouldn't focus too much attention on causes or correlations. Another thing Bancroft says is that a lot of time, abusive behavior makes the abuser seem "crazy" when they're really quite aware of what they're doing.
posted by salvia at 12:32 AM on December 25, 2008

I'm not at a place where I can access any authors/titles, but there are interesting books and essays out there about the psychological effect owning slaves had on slave owners. You might find it interesting.
posted by Nattie at 6:25 AM on December 25, 2008

I've heard at least one individual claim he had PTSD from memories of his own violent acts against others. (He was also somewhere on Axis II.)
posted by availablelight at 7:33 AM on December 25, 2008

Would it make sense to think of the question this way:

"What mental disorders are not associated with abusive behavior toward children?"

I guess depression could mainly manifest as neglect, but that's a kind of abuse.

As for why not list it as a symptom: if my ill-thought-out hypothesis is correct, and most psychological problems in a parent are going to be bad for children in that parent's care, then the presence of "abuse" isn't going to be a distinguishing symptom. That is, you know something's wrong, maybe, but you won't necessarily know what.

Specific kinds of abuse may be more indicative of narrower classes of problems, though.
posted by amtho at 8:54 AM on December 25, 2008

Also, many of the standard medications used to treat the above disorders (including many SSRIs and other antidepressants) can cause irritability, anxiety, and rage -- so, frustratingly, abusive behavior can be as much a symptom of treatment as of illness.
posted by quarantine at 10:16 AM on December 25, 2008

There are a number of ways to approach this question, which you haven't framed very clearly.

One of the issues is that you get into a circular loop with this question. If your behaviors or mental state interfere with your abiity to function in society and in your close relationships, you are mentally ill. If you are abusive, therefore, you are mentally ill by definition. Then asking what kind of mental illness produces abusive behaviors is not a fruitful question; the answer is "the ones that make people be abusive."

One reason of many that this has not been investigated fully is that physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children is one of the things that our society frowns upon most strongly. There is not going to be any support for inventing or creating a diagnosis - say, Abusive Personality Disorder - that allows people to say, for example in court, "Oh, it wasn't me abusing the child - it was my mental illness doing it, I myself am blameless." For example, alcohol addiction is defined as a mental illness, but it does not excuse a DUI conviction; rather the DUI conviction is simply regarded as evidence in support of the presence of the illness.

From a slightly wider point of view, what does this do to efforts to understand the cause of abusive behavior, and prevent or treat those causes? Well, I don't think it's very good for those efforts, in the same way that incarcerating alcoholics who drive drunk and stripping them of their driving privileges doesn't do much to cure their alcoholism. People who abuse children garner very little sympathy, from the mental health field or anywhere else; most of them live as pariahs and society demonstrates very little interest in rehabilitating or helping them.

What is the goal of your question? What would you actually like to understand? Why you were abused? Why someone you're living with now is abusive? Don't dance around your real question.
posted by ikkyu2 at 11:28 AM on December 25, 2008

Sorry - this turned out to be long!

Both of my parents were abusive, and I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the reasoning behind their actions. I'm in no way a mental health expert, but I've had a bit of time to examine abusers "first hand" so to speak.

The primary factor in most abuse, I think, is the need for control. It may not even be the need to control a child or spouse per se, but these people are a constant in the environment of the abuser, and so present the best opportunities for control. The abusers that I know had very little sense of security in their lives, and rigid and arbitrary control of another person made up for the security that they couldn't make for themselves. My dad was abused by his father, and his mother did nothing to prevent it (nor would she ever say a negative word against my grand-father, even after his death). My mom was orphaned at an early age and raised in poverty by her brothers. Both of them are/were the most fearful people I've ever met in my life.

Abuse is highly personal - not only it is coming from someone you should be able to trust completely - it also wouldn't be satisfying to the abuser if it were not. The abuser needs to think that the abuse is deserved - neither of my parents thought they were doing the wrong thing, or if they did, they thought they were pushed to it by the out of control behavior of the abused. Along with being fearful, abusers also have a massive streak of self-pity. They feel that they are doing the best they can, just trying to get through a hostile and chaotic world. This is one of the primary reason I stopped trying to talk to my parents about what happened as I was growing up - the self-righteous justifications were enough to make me consider murder.

As an adult, I still see the syndrome continuing in my mother (my dad died last year). Now that I am a (semi) successful adult, my mother considers me an authority figure and vacillates between kissing my ass and trying to bleed me dry. My youngest brother, who was once the "golden child" and merely got the enabling end of the spectrum, rather than the physical/emotional abuse, is now an out of work alcoholic living with my mom. She now mentally abuses him nearly constantly.

In the end - it's about fear and the need to control one's environment, and power in the hands of people who never learned compassion and empathy.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:53 AM on December 26, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]