People are often treated as unreliable narrators of their own past, and this scepticism runs especially deep around emotionally charged early experiences.

Researchers have long worried that memories of abuse and neglect might shift depending on someone’s mood, mental health or current circumstances, meaning what someone tells a researcher, doctor or social worker one year might not match what they’d say the next.

Our new research, published in Nature Mental Health, suggests that these fears may be overstated. We found that reports of childhood maltreatment remain highly stable over time – at least over a period of a few years.

Childhood maltreatment covers experiences of physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. Most research into how these experiences affect mental and physical health relies on retrospective self-reports. Essentially, it involves asking people to describe what happened to them based on memory.

These reports show consistently stronger links with mental health outcomes than reports from outside observers. But this has raised an uncomfortable question: are these stronger links genuine, or are they artefacts of people’s current mood, colouring how they remember their past?

Whether memories of maltreatment are stable isn’t just........

© The Conversation