Childhood Abuse, Neglect and Personality Disorders in Drug Users

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to seek relationship between childhood abuse, neglect and personality disorder in drug users. It was hypothesized that (1) there is likely to be a relationship between childhood neglect and personality disorder, (2) childhood neglect and abuse is likely to predict personality disorders in drug users. The data was comprised ofN=50 participants (male) taken from different teaching hospitals of Lahore; Mayo Hospital Lahore, Ganga Ram Hospital Lahore, Punjab Institute of Mental Health and Fountain House. The data was collected with the help of Demographic Questionnaire, Childhood Abuse and Neglect Questionnaire (Sitwat &Yousaf, 2010) and Comprehensive Diagnostic Instrument for Personality Disorder (CDIP) (Dawood & Khan, 2010). Pearson Product Moment was employed to find out the correlation between childhood abuse, neglect and personality disorders. Stepwise Regression analysis was done to see predictors of personality disorders. The results of Pearson product moment correlation among study variables revealed that emotional abuse and neglectwas significantly and positively related with schizoid personality disorder, whereas sexual abuse and neglect was found significantly and positively related to the narcissistic personality disorder.Results of regression analysis revealed that sexual abuse and neglect was the only variable which significantly predicting narcissistic personality disorder,whereas emotional abuse and neglect was found significant predictor ofschizoid personality disorder.