Grummitt and colleagues published a paper titled “The burden of mental disorders and suicide attributable to childhood maltreatment” in JAMA Psychiatry in May 2024. They sought out to investigate the proportion of mental health conditions in Australia that are attributable to childhood maltreatment, accounting for genetic and environmental factors.

They conducted a meta-analysis of 34 studies that included 54,646 participants and applied those findings to estimates of childhood maltreatment of 8503 Australians from national surveys. The conditions that were examined were anxiety, depression, substance use, self-harm, and suicide attempts. They defined childhood maltreatment as physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect prior to 18 years of age.

The researchers found that childhood maltreatment accounted for 41% of suicide attempts, 35% of cases of self-harm, and 21% of diagnoses of depression. They also determined that in 2023, the burden of illness resulted in 66,143 years of life lost and 118,493 years of disability.

The study was able to produce preliminary causal conclusions of the negative effects of childhood maltreatment on mental health.

Read the research article here.