In Brief: Names will often hu... Health Article
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In Brief
The children's rhyme denies it, but it may be true. Words are weapons that can cause lasting wounds, especially when wielded by parents against children. The damage is sometimes more serious and lasting than injuries that result from beatings, say Harvard researchers reporting on a survey of young adults.
More than 500 people aged 18–22 who responded to an advertisement were asked whether their parents had ever yelled at them, sworn at them, insulted, threatened, or ridiculed them. Among those who reported no physical or sexual abuse, the researchers chose the 10% most often subject to this verbal abuse and compared them with controls.
All the participants answered a series of questionnaires about symptoms of depression, anxiety, anger, and especially dissociative experiences — split consciousness, out-of-body sensations, a sense of unreality. They were also asked about symptoms typical of temporal lobe epilepsy, including transient hallucinations and automatic actions, as well as dissociative experiences.
All types of abuse — sexual, physical, and emotional (including verbal abuse and witnessing domestic violence) — raised the risk of depression, anxiety, dissociation, and epilepsy-like symptoms. Emotional abuse had as great an effect as the other kinds, and verbal abuse was a particularly strong risk factor for dissociative episodes and epilepsy-like symptoms.
The authors speculate that name-calling and threats cause stress that affects the development of vulnerable brain regions or serve as an unfortunate model for adult communication. The effects can be severe, they suspect, partly because verbal abuse may be more continuous and relentless than sexual or physical abuse.
The symptoms found in adults subject to childhood verbal abuse could also have genetic roots, as the authors acknowledge. Abuse of all kinds, including verbal, is more likely when a parent suffers from mental illness, and most psychiatric disorders have a genetic component. Furthermore, people with current psychiatric symptoms are more likely than others to report childhood maltreatment, but their memories are not necessarily reliable or objective. That means the association discovered in the study could be influenced by heredity and biased recall as well as the abuse itself.
The authors point out that in surveys, 63% of American parents admit that they have sworn at or insulted a child at some time. The authors note that physical child abuse and witnessing domestic violence are regarded as traumatic experiences that create a risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. The study suggests that when verbal abuse is constant and severe, it too creates that risk — although parents should not be concerned that children will be traumatized by an occasional harsh or angry word.
Teicher MH, et al. "Sticks, Stones, and Hurtful Words: Relative Effects of Various Forms of Childhood Maltreatment," American Journal of Psychiatry (June 2006): Vol. 163, No. 6, pp. 993–1000.