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The confluence of violence towards an intimate partner, substance misuse and mental health: a worldwide problem affecting women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Cari Jo Clark
Affiliation:
Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Grace Wyshak
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Departments of Biostatistics and Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA, email wyshak@hsph.harvard.edu
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Violence towards an intimate partner, substance misuse and other mental health disorders are problems that tend to cluster together and result in multiple burdens for afflicted individuals (Desjarlais et al, 1995; Wyshak & Modest, 1996; Wyshak, 2000). They are prevalent not only in high-risk groups but also among members of the general public seeking primary healthcare (Bauer et al, 2000; World Health Organization, 2001), where their afflictions often go undiagnosed and untreated (Edlund et al, 2004; Kramer et al, 2004). Furthermore, violence towards an intimate partner, substance misuse and other mental health disorders involve common symptom pathways, such as psychiatric distress, headache, abdominal pain, gastrointestinal problems and multiple somatic complaints (Berwick et al, 1991), which suggests that the use of an integrated set of screening instruments may lead to early detection and treatment for patients who are suffering from one or more of these problems.

Type
Thematic paper – Women's mental health and oppression
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2005

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