Dissociation and childhood trauma in psychologically disturbed adolescents

发表于：American Journal of Psychiatry · 年份：1991 · DOI：10.1176/ajp.148.1.50 · 被引用次数：144 · 研究领域：Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development、Language Development and Disorders、Educational and Psychological Assessments

OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that dissociation in adolescence is positively correlated with stress or abuse experienced earlier, the authors assessed dissociation in a heterogeneous group of disturbed adolescents and examined the relationship between the degree of dissociation and the degree of reported childhood stress, abuse, or trauma. METHOD: The subjects were 47 adolescents, 13-17 years old, who were institutionalized for periods of 1-13 weeks in a private mental hospital; 35 were girls and 12 were boys. Participants completed the Dissociative Experiences Scale and a child abuse and trauma questionnaire. The hospital records of 40 of the 47 adolescents were also available. RESULTS: Scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale correlated significantly with self-reported physical abuse or punishment, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, neglect, and negative home atmosphere but not with abuse ratings made from hospital records. CONCLUSIONS: Together with the authors' previous work showing a relation between childhood stress and later dissociation in normal college students, these findings support the view that dissociation represents a reaction to early negative experience and places multiple personality disorder at the extreme end of a continuum of dissociative sequelae of childhood trauma. Researchers should continue to try to identify psychiatric patients with prominent dissociative characteristics or symptoms and attempt to correlate this phenomenology with negative...