Abuse Leaves More Than Bruises and Emotional Scars

Abuse can actually cause physical deformities in the child’s brain, said Dr. Martin Teicher of McLean’s developmental biopsychiatry research program. Dr. Teicher said that verbal abuse (which would classify as emotional abuse) can be as damaging as sexual abuse.

Dr. Teicher also found that the fibrous link between the two hemispheres of children’s brains is changed in abused children and affect the communication between the right (mostly emotional) and left (mostly logical) lobes of the brain. Dr. Teicher has had this theory about the link between abuse and physical brain abnormalities since 1984, but only recently with the acceptance of mental illness as a physical disorder has his theory received much publicity. Boston Globe Online/ Dec 15, 2000.