Addressing intimate partner violence could lower rates of mental illness as intimate partner violence significantly increases the likelihood of a person developing mental health problems.
This is according to a new report looking at the interrelationship between intimate partner violence and mental health problems that were published by the Lancet Psychiatry. The Lancet Psychiatry Commission report was compiled by an international team of mental health experts, including Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Professor Soraya Seedat.
The authors suggested that reducing levels of intimate partner violence experienced by women and witnessed by their children could go a long way to bringing down the number of people who experience illnesses like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The report revealed that 27% of women and girls aged 15 or over have experienced either physical or sexual intimate partner violence.
“A root cause of this is gender inequality, something that manifests itself at all levels of society. Women and girls living in societies that are most unequal in terms of gender relations are at the highest risk of experiencing intimate partner violence, especially where violence against women is an accepted norm,” the authors said.
The commission suggested that challenging these beliefs early, in institutions such as schools, can be an effective means of ensuring they do not take hold later in life.
“Our findings reinforce the need for mental health services to follow the NICE Public Health 2014 guidance, which recommended mental health professionals routinely ask about IPV as it is so common an experience of people using mental health services,” said the Commission’s lead author and a professor in Women’s Mental Health at King’s College London UK, Professor Louise Howard.
The report further said that experiencing intimate partner violence significantly increases the likelihood of a person developing mental health problems.
The Commission said the design of mental health services, however, means that they too often concentrate on symptoms that users have rather than establishing what happened to them and how they can be best supported.
“There is a distinct lack of training offered to mental health professionals like myself. I am a practising psychiatrist. As a medical student, a trainee, and even when I started practising in general adult psychiatry, I was never taught about the effects of domestic violence. Given how prevalent this is among service users, this represents a desperate oversight that urgently needs to be addressed,” Howard said.
The Commission said that intimate partner violence is a problem that has been marginalised for too long and needs a collective societal response for it to be addressed.
“Collective momentum must be matched with real world actions. In recent years, we have seen the funding for specialist intimate partner violence services reduced, including in-services designed specifically to aid women from racial minority backgrounds, which were already severely underfunded,” said Professor Helen Fisher, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at King’s IoPPN.
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