Emotional and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) appear to be associated with elevated risk for psychotic experiences in adulthood and results of a recent study expand on prior findings that link psychotic experiences and childhood trauma exposure to include intimate adult exposures. Data were collected from 1,615 participants in 4 US cities. Psychotic experiences were assessed through the World Health Organization (WHO) Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) psychosis screen along with adapted IPV measures. Researchers found:

• Findings revealed that experiencing at least 1 form of IPV was significantly associated with each of the 4 psychotic experiences assessed for both men and women.
• The strongest associations were found for threatening and sexual IPV; physical IPV was not significantly associated with psychotic experiences.
• Exposure to IPV was associated with more than a tripling of the odds of reporting at least 1 psychotic experience as opposed to none.
• Among those exposed to IPV there was between 3- to 5 times the odds of reporting specific subtypes of psychotic experiences.