Grant: Centres for Research Development in Gender, Mental Health and Addictions - FA

The mental health of children and adults across many areas, including substance use, mood and personality disorders can be profoundly affected by violence in the home. These effects often persist, and can contribute to ongoing cycles of violence and poor health. Child maltreatment (CM) and intimate partner violence (IPV) are global public health problems for which there are few proven interventions; also, while thought to affect primarily females, there is evidence that exposure to child physical abuse is at least as, if not more, common in males, and both women and men are victims of IPV and its mental health consequences. Despite the known link between mental health and family violence, they have received relatively little research focus, especially in the areas of intervention. With family violence affecting at least 30% of Canadians, there is a pressing need for a coherent and integrated approach to the problem of family violence and its mental health outcomes, and to look at this for both males and females. Our proposed Centre for Research Development in Gender, Mental Health and Violence Across the Lifespan has three main goals: (1) to increase our understanding of the links between mental health problems and CM and IPV; (2) to develop strategies to prevent or reduce CM, IPV and subsequent mental health problems; and (3) to share and exchange knowledge within the team of Centre investigators and with stakeholders such as policy-makers, health and social service providers, advocates and members of the public. We will do this by: (1) creating an international network of researchers, clinicians and policy-makers to set priorities for research to reduce family violence, and to better understand the links between CM, IPV and mental health by analysing data from existing studies, (2) understanding and fostering resilience in mental health outcomes after exposure to violence and (3) developing innovations in knowledge exchange tailored to the area of violence.