However, even if the individual has no recollection, early abuse may manifest later in life through various emotional and behavioural ways.

For countless years, the world has grappled with the best approach to heal the emotional wounds borne by individuals who have endured traumatising events during their childhood.

The perennial debate is whether these memories should be unearthed to dissipate their destructive power, gently transformed into less painful experiences, or left undisturbed altogether.

A recent study by a collaborative team from King’s College London and the City University of New York brings a new perspective to this age-old conundrum.

In their research, the team regularly interviewed a sample of 1,196 American adults over a span of 15 years about their anxiety and depression levels.

Intriguingly, 665 of these subjects were selected based on court records demonstrating childhood mistreatment such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect before they turned 12.

A significant variance was observed among the adults who reported their experiences of abuse and those who didn’t.

The 492 adults whose self-reports of mistreatment were confirmed by court records displayed notably higher levels of depression and anxiety than a control group with no documented history of abuse.

However, the 173 subjects who did not acknowledge having been abused, despite having court records validating the occurrence, did not show distress signs more than the general population.

According to Dr. Andrea Danese, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King’s College London and one of the study’s joint authors, these findings underscore the power of personal perception and interpretation of early childhood events on an individual’s adult mental health, reported The New York Times.

In a 2019 meta-analysis involving 16 studies of childhood maltreatment, Dr. Danese and his colleagues found a significant discrepancy between the documented cases of childhood abuse and the reported cases during research interviews.

However, Dr. Danese was quick to note that the study’s results should not be seen as a green light for avoiding distressing memories, which could potentially exacerbate them. Rather, they highlight the potential effectiveness of therapeutic strategies aiming to re-organise and moderate memories.

The study’s findings have far-reaching implications, given the heated debates in the field of psychiatry about how to handle traumatic childhood memories.

From Sigmund Freud’s early theories about childhood sexual abuse to the controversial techniques of hypnosis and age regression in the late 20th century, the question of how to approach these traumatic memories has remained contentious.

In more recent years, the management of traumatic memories has been a focus of therapies for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, with increasing advocacy for patient screening for adverse childhood experiences to facilitate mental health treatment.