Negative childhood experiences like abuse or neglect are largely associated with the mental health outcomes of older homeless adults.
That’s according to a new report by UC San Francisco released Wednesday that chronicled 350 homeless adults over the age of 50 living in Oakland between July 2013 and June 2014.
While it’s difficult to completely attribute homelessness to adverse childhood experiences, the study revealed that the frequency of such experiences as a child directly related to depressive symptoms later in life and a person’s history of suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations.
“We can’t provide causality, but [what we saw was] an amazingly strong association between the number of early childhood adversities and your current mental health outcomes,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and senior author on the study that was published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
The study asked participants about seven categories of negative childhood events: neglect, verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, the death of a parent, parental incarceration and placement in the child welfare system.
Those who experienced multiple negative events were determined to be more likely to suffer from depression, Kushel explained.
“For instance, having one childhood adversity [means] you have two times the odds of having moderate to severe depression today than people who had zero,” she said.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Dudnick, go to http://www.sfexaminer.com/ucsf...ities-homelessness/#]
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