Psychology

Your doctor gives you a choice: prolonged life or rapid decline. If you are an abuse victim, a recent National Institutes of Health-funded study indicates, you might choose decline.

David W. Pantalone, a clinical psychologist at Suffolk University, studied 171 HIV-positive gay men. Each month, abused men skipped nearly 20 percent of their HIV medications. Pantalone links statistically abuse, psychological distress, and poor physical health.

“The world dichotomizes mental and physical health, but we know that isn’t really so,” Pantalone says. He looked at interpersonal violence, such as child and partner abuse and tied this violence to mental health: symptoms of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Then, using a 700-question survey and data pulled directly from participants’ electronic medical records, he measured physical health by looking at the frequency of emergency room visits, reports of physical injury and chronic pain, and missed HIV medication doses. read more »