Post Traumatic Health

I'm certain being raped is why I was suicidal for decades and it was a serious physical health issue.

This is a post about the physical health consequences of rape and child molestation.

This is an opinionated piece. I am unaware of studies and I'm NOT going to go googling for studies in order to have "citations."

If YOU want to google for studies, feel free. My understanding of this problem space does not come from studies.

I was molested from age 11 to age 13.5 roughly and also raped the summer I turned twelve. Starting at age twelve, I was suicidal and I remained suicidal until my mid fifties when an old cyst on my back resolved dramatically and after that I STOPPED being suicidal. (Mostly resolved -- it's been more than two years and that area is STILL draining, but I am MOSTLY no longer suicidal.)

For some months afterwards, suicidal ideation persisted as kind of a "bad habit" and when it occurred it was an indicator that I was at the end of my rope -- exhausted, dehydrated, needing to eat, drink and sleep. I would take care of myself and wake up no longer suicidal.

Part of what helped me conclude that being RAPED at age twelve caused me to have some kind of PHYSICAL ailment of some sort that MADE ME suicidal is a story about a Dutch teen who was sexually assaulted at age 11, raped at age 14 and eventually took her own life because she was just miserable all the time and it was not getting better.

The English-language articles about the case were pretty bad and showed up in sketchy publications with bad reputations, but people in comments on Hacker News, at least SOME of whom were Dutch and reading primary sources in the Dutch language, corrected some of the wild mischaracterizations found in English sources.

She was not euthanized. The Netherlands has right to die laws, but she was denied the right to die. She committed suicide.

Over the years, I've had extensive conversations with a number of people who were molested as children or survivors of adult sexual assault and it's extremely common for them to have mystery ailments, terrible health problems for years following the assault, etc.

STDs -- Sexually Transmitted Diseases -- tend to be ugly infections that aren't easily caught. You don't get AIDS by having coffee with someone who is HIV-positive. You need more intimate contact than that.

So it should be no surprise that sexual assault would be likely to introduce microbes into the system in a way that's especially problematic. For example, I knew one rape survivor who had vaginal infections for MONTHS afterwards while doctors blew her off and she finally insisted on testing and it turned out she had vaginal strep. After treating that, her chronic, severe yeast infections resolved.

In a college class on Environmental Biology, I remember my professor commenting that when parasites get into the system some way other than their usual pathway, it can be worse than what they usually do and she said "For example, they can end up in the brain." So trauma can lead to not only ugly infections that aren't easy to catch, but ugly infections in strange places they don't normally go and it causes weird health issues and doctors are NOT good at catching this fact.

Everything I have read and seen also suggests that pedophilia is probably due to head trauma and old trauma can be a respository for infection. Which means that most likely, child molesters are unwell and are exposing young people with still developing immune systems to their unidentified infections at an early age and under circumstances where it is likely to go undiagnosed and the child may develop chronic health issues that no one ever links back to the real cause.

People with chronic health issues from an early age tend to not get adequate medical care. They tend to get treated like "Well, your body is just like that." and it's common for doctors to pursue a course of symptom management with NO GOAL of ACTUALLY curing them.

Individuals

If you were molested as a child or sexually assaulted as an adult, consider the possibility that your lingering mental health issues may have a medical component and any seemingly "random" health issues may be related to the assault. Try to track down a specific infection if at all possible and treat for that.

Some general tips from across this site:

• Wash everything and/or throw things out. If you have been infected long term, your THINGS probably are infected as well.
• Improve your nutrition by looking for evidence of specific deficiencies as a relatively safe, non-drug means to help you fight your health issues. (Be aware that this may make existing infections worse and may cause them to flare. Also: Iron deficiency can suggest parasitic infection.)
• Start a file and start searching the internet for your symptoms. See if you can't find a specific infection that matches what is going on with you. Seek testing if possible once you have a hypothesis.

Community Health

If you work in a school, etc. and a pedophile is identified, I encourage you to find acceptable ways to suggest to parents that their children should get a physical as they may have MEDICAL issues, such as infection, as a consequence of the trauma and treating their MEDICAL issues is an essential first step in recovery, one that is much easier to help people with than vague, scary mental health things.

This thought is NOT radical nor new. At my very first visit to an OBGYN in my teens, because of my history of sexual assault they ran blood tests for STDs.

The piece that may be "news" to you and which should encourage you is that studies in developing countries, like Kenya, show that community health efforts to deworm school children have far-reaching impact in both space and time. The health of the surrounding community improves for kilometers in all directions and the impact is felt on later generations of children in the same area.

"The most surprising thing about the study in Kenya was the widespread impact," Kremer says. The program drove down infection rates for several kilometers around the schools, he says, and there were significant improvements in attendance for untreated students, in the treatment schools as well as in nearby schools not in the program.

And because the schoolchildren in their communities were dewormed in the late 1990s, infants in those communities faced lower rates of infection than they otherwise would have.

This has a direct bearing on poverty in a community, or a country. When hundreds of individuals in a community can be freed from infection, he explained, their improved health and education can help unlock the community’s development potential.

So if you can identify many of the victims and treat any medical issues related to their trauma, the entire community may get healthier and you can begin reversing the serious negative impact on the community.

Rest assured, this WILL have positive mental health impacts, both because mystery ailments that never get better are all kinds of head fuckery and because it's something you can TAKE CONTROL OF and DO SOMETHING ABOUT in the aftermath and that's one of the best antidotes to the terrible feeling of helplessness that victims and the people who care about them feel about such things.