When Emotional Abuse Enters the Courtroom: The Role of Mental Health Evaluations

Even if you don’t see any physical manifestations of emotional abuse, it has much more of an impact on the way that you think, feel, behave, and go about your daily life than does physical violence. While physical violence is generally overt in the form of punches or other physical acts, emotional abuse often takes on much less overt forms, such as manipulation, intimidation, humiliation, control, isolation, and/or unwavering criticism. Over time, many victims will begin to doubt their own memory, judgment, and self-worth. Until they experience how much the psychological impact of their emotional abuse has affected them, many victims do not even realize that they have suffered from emotional abuse.
Once an emotional abuse case has reached the court, the level of complexity increases substantially. It is challenging to show what constitutes emotional abuse through photographs or medical scans, so courts often rely on behavioral patterns, the emotional … Read more


