BOSTON (Boston Globe) - The harsh words, brutal beatings or sexual advances of a parent or older family member might actually cause brain deformities in a child that plagues them into adulthood, concludes a reasearcher at McLean Hospital in a paper released Thursday.

The findings challenge long-held notions that all mental illnesses can be neatly divided into physical or emotional problems.

The prevailing orthodoxy in the psychiatric world is that some conditions, like schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder, are caused by inherited chemical imbalances in the brain that can be treated by pharmaceuticals. The other category is personality disorders that arise from emotional trauma and can be dealt with through therapy.

But the paper by Dr. Martin Teicher, director of McLean's Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program in Belmont, Mass., offers compelling evidence that emotional trauma like childhood abuse can actually cause physical deformities in the brain. The deformities, in turn, can cause depression, anxiety and a host of other conditions later in life, he found.

"The brain is fundamentally sculpted by our experiences. Adverse experience will sculpt our brain in a different way," said Teicher.

In the paper, which appears in the journal Cerebrum, Teicher focuses primarily on "serious" abuse cases involving sexual and physical assault. But in an interview he previewed his upcoming work which finds similar initial results involving verbal abuse, an even more controversial assertion that challenges the time-honored parenting techniques of the tongue lashing and shaming.

"Verbal abuse may be just as damaging as sexual abuse. And it's very prevalent and something that a lot of people need to be concerned about," said Teicher.

"It's going to be interesting to see how this emerges over the next few years," he said, noting that he is still writing the first paper on the topic. "But we are finding that verbal abuse is devastating."

Perhaps most interesting about Teicher's current paper is the affect of child abuse on the ability of one hemisphere of the brain to communicate with the other. The major phone line between the left and right sides is called the corpus callosum. Teicher's team reviewed the MRI brain scans, which show the corpus callosum, of 51 abused children admitted to McLean. He compared them to the MRIs from 97 healthy children.

In the abused children, the corpus callosum was smaller on average. Interestingly, in girls, sexual abuse shrunk the corpus callosum but neglect had no effect but, in boys, the opposite was true.

The result of a smaller corpus callosum can be that children can "reside" in one hemisphere of the brain rather than the seamless shifting between the two typically found. And this problem can linger into adulthood, causing anxiety and depression.

"A lot of individuals who have survived childhood trauma reside in their left hemisphere when they are function well. But when traumatic thoughts arise they retreat into their right," said Teicher. "They can get very emotional, without any of the logic of the left side there to guide them."

An early diagnosis of this sort of dysfunctionality might allow for treatment that would help the corpus callosum "re-grow." For instance, music therapy, such as intensive piano lessons, might help, said Teicher. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere and the left hand by the right; coordinating them through piano playing could make hemispheric communication more efficient, goes the theory.

In the new paper, Teicher also found that childhood abuse might cause the arrested development of the left hemisphere and improper development of the portions of the brain that regulate emotions.

Evidence that enivornmental stresses cause brain deformities was established in lab animals almost 50 years ago. But researchers were slow to test the hypothesis on humans. The stumbling block was the difficulty with untangling whether the abuse caused the deformities or the deformities made people more succeptable to abuse.

Teicher first developed his theories in the late 1980s but sat on his data for five years for fear that "the field wasn't ready to hear it."

The hesitance was provoked by a century of Freudian dominance, in which abuse was thought to lead to emotional wounds that could be dealt with in verbal therapy. Then in 1990s, scientists established that some mental diseases were inherited physical disorders. Quickly, all mental illnesses were forced into one of these two categories.

Teicher still remembers the 1984 conference where he first introduced his idea that emotional trauma causes physical problems.

"They were curiously interested," he laughed.

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