The Origins of

Mental Illnesses

It sounds cliché to say that emotionally disturbed people had a bad childhood, but in 80% of the cases it is very true indeed. Behind almost every personality disorder there is a history of either mental or physical abuse. Physical Abuse can be sexual or brutal or both in nature. All abuses are mental abuses. When adults try to compare the abuses they have suffered during their childhood some believe that their abuse was "worse" by virtue of being physical or sexual. Mental abuse can be just as traumatic as the other types. There are many variables involved in the degree of the psychological injury.

Of all the abuses that children endure, the younger that the child is exposed to those abuses the more psychological damage will arise from the abuse. According to psychoanalytical theory, the younger the child is the greater the abuse will effect his/her personality. The most vulnerable ages are before the age of 10. After this age the personality is more developed and is not as vulnerable to negative influences. The younger the child is exposed to the damaging element the more permanent and severe the damage to the personality. A child the age of two would be more psychologically damaged if he/she suffered the mental injuries at 1 than at 10.

The problem is that the parents who are abusive to small children, they usually continue to abuse the child as long as they have exposure to them. Most parents actually think that they are doing what is in the best interests of the child when they are inflicting psychological abuse. For example, I will describe a mother's treatment of her son when they were in a waiting room at a Dr.'s office. The child was approx. 2 years old and he wanted to walk around the room and began to whine. The mother told the child to shut up and sit still in a very cruel tone of voice. This made the child more unhappy so he whined more. At this point the mother physically grabbed her son and jerked him into the chair and told him to shut up and behave himself louder than she did before. At this point the child began to cry and stood up getting off the chair. Then the mother grabbed her son took him out into the hallway and smacked him across the face and jerked him back and forth screaming at him in a very cruel voice to shut up and stop being a baby.

The problem with this scenario is that the mother probably believed that she is "disciplining" her child. In reality, every action this mother took to prevent the child from whining in turn made the child whine more. But the mother was not concerned with what she was doing to her child. She was concerned with her bills, her boyfriend (or lack thereof) but mostly herself, and she couldn't have cared less what kind of humiliations she was making the child suffer. The mother appeared to be very satisfied when the child sat still crying intensely with lifeless eyes. When this child grows up he will be hateful and cruel and most likely be a juvenile delinquent.

So how does a child cope and endure psychological injuries like this all of his life? He numbs himself. He cuts himself off from his own emotions. He self medicates himself in a world of drug abuse. He withdraws from his positive friends because of remarkably low self esteem and surrounds himself with other children of the same "numbness." Then he grows up to have very severe mental illness.

The grand problem with the way parents all to frequently raise their children is that the children are told they are "bad" all the time. Most parents have the belief that the only way to discipline their kids is by telling them that they are bad. Children don't make the distinction that their actions are what is bad. Instead they internalize the identity that they are bad themselves. The more frequently these humiliations are suffered the greater the child adopts this belief. The idea of being bad can be assimilated by the child in different ways. The child could become withdrawn and have very low self esteem or become very aggressive and practice acts of cruelty. These are two of the most common pathways that the child's personality development can flow toward. The end result is always similar in as much as when the child enters adulthood, his or her social skills are completely deficient and depending on how greatly the child's self image was, the young adult could be game for a label of mental illness.