Emotional Abuse and Mental Injury: A Critique of the Concepts and a Recommendation for Practice

An overview of emotional maltreatment and failure-to-thrive

“…The problem of de®ning, assessing and dealing with psychological maltreatment is complicated further by uncertainty regarding whether the emphasis should be on abusive parental behaviour or on the development of the child. Some researchers have focused on parental behaviour that is considered to be damaging (Bailey and Bailey, 1986;McGee and Wolfe, 1991); others, however, have proposed that parental behaviour is an inadequate predictor of emotional damage and have focused on child outcomes (Aber and Zigler, 1981;Kavanagh, 1982 Garbarino, Guttmann and Seeley (1986) de®ne psychological maltreatment as a`concerted attack by an adult on a child's development of self and social competence'. They put forward ®ve damaging parental behaviours: rejecting, isolating, terrorizing, ignoring and corrupting.…”

Applying a prospective approach to the treatment of abuse by adolescent parents.

“…Researchers have also linked abuse with nonorganic failure to thrive (Greenberg, 1970). Some investigators hypothesize that abuse causes nonorganic failure to thrive (Kavanagh, 1982; Money, 1977), while others suggest that the stress of having a sick child causes parents to become abusive (Hunter et al, 1978; Klein & Stern, 1971; Sherrod, O’Connor, & Vietze, 1984).…”

Psychological maltreatment: Toward an operational definition

“…These phenomena are considered to be "psychological" largely because they are describing nonphysical parental behaviors, nonphysical child outcomes, or both. In one perspective (cell 2), negative nonphysical behaviors (e.g., consistently ignoring an infant) can result in physical consequences to the child (e.g., nonorganic failure to thrive) (Kavanagh, 1982). Alternatively, a parent's negative physical behaviors can result in psychological trauma to the child (cell 3), as when the child becomes excessively fearful after repeated incidents of physical or sexual abuse (e.g., Brassard & Gelardo, 1987;Garbarino et al, 1986).…”

“…the behavioral, cognitive, affective, ox physical functioning of the child" (p. 2; emphasis added). Still others recognize emotional deprivation to be abusive only to the extent that it causes physically obvious syndromes such as deprivation dwarfism or failure to thrive (e.g., Kavanagh, 1982). Whereas some authors (Baily & Baily, 1986) suggest that psychological maltreatment can be defined on the basis of parental behavior alone (i.e., that damage to the child does not have to be immediately apparent), others insist that both negative parenting and child behavior problems must be present (Corson & Davidson, 1987).…”