The purpose of this study is to investigate the psychiatric problems of rape victims.

The author observed the psychiatric symptoms of the 10 women patients who visited psychiatric clinics immediately after rape after trauma, and made a related survey of 61 other 61 female outpatients in order to compare psychiatric symptoms of those of them who reported the history of rape trauma and those of the others who did not have such history.

Results are given as follows :

1) The most frequent psychiatric diagnosis of the victims of rather recent day's rape was posttraumatic stress disorder(4/10), followed by depression(2/10) and Schizoaffective disorder(2/10). The most frequent perpetrator was unknown person(8/10).

2) 49.2% of the other 61 patients of psychiatric clinic reported the history of abuse, including 26.2% and 36.1% of them reporting sexual abuse and physical abuse, respectively.

3) Sexual dysfunction was reported in 58.3% of the rape victims, who generally showed a tendency toward the high level of anxiety, hostility and paranoid symptoms.

4) The high scored dissociation was observed in rape victims but not in non-abuse group.

The rape trauma appears to be responsible for some psychiatric symptoms, or at least to be a precipitating factor of psychiatric disorders. The author also confirmed that aftermath of the rape trauma can continue rather perennially, for years after trauma or even for life ling.

This study investigated the correlations between childhood sexual abuse and the severity of psychopathology symptoms in adulthood and the usefulness of adult psychiatric symptoms, diagnoses, and medications as factors in the identification of patients who have been sexually abused in childhood.

The subject of this study were 21 childhood sexually abused female inpatients and 22 nonabused female inpatients(psychiatric control group). All subjects were interviewed and completed self report instruments that focused of childhood sexual histoy of trauma, and current general psychiatric symptoms, dissociative symptoms.

Sexually abused broup showed significantly higher rates of divorce than psychiatric control group. Relative to psychiatric control group, sexually abused group have more hospitalization, higher proportion of more suicidal symptoms and more often major pharmacological tratment. Sexually abused group manifested significantly higher levels of dissociative symptoms and general psychiatric symptoms, including interpersonal sensitivity, psychoticism, obsessive compulsive and global severity index.

Findings suggest that childhood sexual abuse is associated with adult psychiatric symptoms, especially dissociative symptoms and work as etiology of psychopathology of boderline personalitiy disorder.