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Please disprove re abuse

Posted by lampguy on 08 May 2008 at 04:55 GMT

I'm entering this again because the page froze.

Incidentally, this study seems to have had two variables, suicide and abuse, that weren't independently varied.

Can anyone wholly disprove the following rank speculation?

1) People with certain mental illnesses may be attracted to each other, as for instance by gentleness and desire for gentleness (only to end up with significant frustrating behavior);

2) They may have mentally ill children for genetic reasons;

3) The children may be unusually difficult to raise because they are mentally ill;

4) The parents may be unusually unfit to raise them because the parents are mentally ill;

5) This may cause child abuse;

6) The children may ultimately be found to have observable brain abnormalities due to:

6.1) genetics, or

6.2) spontaneous biological development, not significantly influenced by experiences, enabled by genetics.

If anyone can disprove this, it will make my day. I come from a troubled family, and I would enjoy being able to blame my hardship on wrongful action. But I've lost a lot of my taste for bogus pretexts.

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If I ran the zoo

lampguy replied to lampguy on 19 May 2008 at 07:25 GMT

Sorry to keep posting. I was sloppy when I said a corrected study could show causation; it could only show correlation.

I've been chewing on this challenge all night. It's fiendishly hard. The best I've come up with is this: You check a large number of nonabused people without a history of traumatic experiences for the brain abnormality. You assume the following for our purpose: If the nature of the child tends to provoke abuse, then there will be a fairly broad variation in the response of the parents.

If the genetics of the child entail parents tending to abuse, that family isn't in our sample, except where the child-parent genetic link is weak or the parents overcome the tendency to abuse. We assume some of the latter are in our sample.

It might be ideal to do this study in Iceland, due to the genetic uniformity. Otherwise, it might help to select subjects according to restricted parameters that are, however, known to include a significant number of abused people, although those people won't be used as subjects.

How many children have the brain abnormality? Very few means that it's probably caused by abuse. Quite a few means 1 or both of 2 things: 1) It's biological and we can't say it's due to experience. 2) It's due to nonabuse traumatic experience or unrecognized abuse. I assume we are helpless to say which.

In so far as the results are dramatic, this study results in a verdict of "Yes" or "Don't know". In the case of quite a few positives, all we know is that we still don't know. We do the study for the sake of the possibility of very few positives. This would mean that the abnormality is caused by abuse.

All of this is invalid if the genetic factor is always either massive or nonexistent.

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