Wounds That Time Won't Heal

Maltreatment at an early age can have enduring negative effects on a child’s brain development and function

... Until recently, psychologists believed that mistreatment during childhood led to arrested psychosocial development and self-defeating psychic defense mechanisms in adults. New brain imaging surveys and other experiments have shown that child abuse can cause permanent damage to the neural structure and function of the developing brain itself. This grim result suggests that much more effort must be made to prevent childhood abuse and neglect before it does irrevocable harm to millions of young victims. New approaches to therapy may also be indicated.

But in the early 1990s mental health professionals believed that emotional and social difficulties occurred mainly through psychological means. Childhood maltreatment was understood either to foster the development of intrapsychic defense mechanisms that proved to be self-defeating in adulthood or to arrest psychosocial development, leaving a "wounded child" within. Researchers thought of the damage as basically a software problem amenable to reprogramming via therapy or simply erasable through the exhortation "Get over it." New investigations into the consequences of early maltreatment, including work my colleagues and I have done at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and at Harvard Medical School, appear to tell a different story. Because childhood abuse occurs during the critical formative time when the brain is being physically sculpted by experience, the impact of severe stress can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development.

ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR resulting from childhood abuse appears to be caused by over excitation of the limbic system, the primitive midbrain region that regulates memory and emotion. Two relatively small, deep-lying brain structures—the hippocampus and the amygdala—are thought to play prominent roles in generating this kind of interpersonal dysfunction. The hippocampus is important in determining what incoming information will be stored in long-term memory. The principal task of the amygdala is to filter and interpret incoming sensory information in the context of the individual's survival and emotional needs and then to help initiate appropriate responses.

Excerpts from Scientific American March 2002 Issue

Wounds That Time Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse. Martin H. Teicher in Cerebrum (Dana Press), Vol. 2, No. 4, pages 50–67; Fall 2000.