They Say: Abuse Changes A Child’s Brain

Researchers who had previously studied the relationships between stress responses and maternal nurturing in animals have taken their work into a new arena, looking at how human brains are affected, in adulthood, by abuse and neglect suffered in childhood. The study, carried out at McGill University in Montreal, is very small (it compared the brains of 12 suicide victims who had been abused to 12 suicide victims who had not been, against a control group of 12 non-suicide brains) but, many in the field agree, could lead to larger-scale research into how childhood trauma can cause lifelong damage to a person’s ability to handle stress.

Like so many studies of how human beings work, this one seems to only confirm the obvious: who among us wouldn’t instinctively know that a terrible childhood leaves permanent scars? And yet it goes further than that — if a biological brain difference is found, therapies could be developed that would offer some hope of healing those previously unhealable wounds. And just as the researchers’ previous work had looked at the multi-generational effect of both good and bad animal parenting, perhaps their ultimate goal would be to figure out how to end the cycle of bad human parenting, one formerly abused or neglected child at a time.