Mental Health.
The Physiological Impact Of Emotional Abuse.
The brain, heart, and gut after emotional abuse.
A person who hasn’t experienced emotional abuse would struggle to understand how it could have any impact, let alone leave behind physical marks. Even the system designed to protect people from harm struggles to identify the realities of emotional abuse.
“Emotional abuse is a widespread and damaging social problem that is often ignored or minimized by the legal system, the child welfare system and the mental health system.” — Rachel H. Flichtbeil.
Some accept depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation as symptoms of emotional abuse, but find it difficult to understand that nervous disorders, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, peptic ulcer, and insulin resistance can also result from emotional abuse.
Several scales identify the physiological effects of mental health. Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) recognize arousal of the autonomic nervous and musculoskeletal systems as measures of mental health disorders.
The Scale of Psychological Abuse in Intimate Partner Violence (EAPA-P) defines…
