Child maltreatment and depression: A meta-analysis of studies using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire

Researchers have documented that child maltreatment is associated with adverse long-term consequences for mental health, including increased risk for depression. Attempts to conduct meta-analyses of the association between different forms of child maltreatment and depressive symptomatology in adulthood, however, have been limited by the wide range of definitions of child maltreatment in the literature.

We sought to meta-analyze a single, widely-used dimensional measure of child maltreatment, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, with respect to depression diagnosis and symptom scores.

192 unique samples consisting of 68,830 individuals.

We explored the association between total scores and scores from specific forms of child maltreatment (i.e., emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect) and depression using a random-effects meta-analysis.

We found that higher child maltreatment scores were associated with a diagnosis of depression (g = 1.07; 95 % CI, 0.95-1.19) and with higher depression symptom scores (Z = .35; 95 % CI, .32-.38). Moreover, although each type of child maltreatment was positively associated with depression diagnosis and scores, there was variability in the size of the effects, with emotional abuse and emotional neglect demonstrating the strongest associations.

These analyses provide important evidence of the link between child maltreatment and depression, and highlight the particularly larger association with emotional maltreatment in childhood.