The role of health professionals

Detection in the first line (Primary Care)

The healthcare system, especially primary care and emergency departments, is often the first and only place where a victim seeks help, even if she does not explicitly seek help for abuse.

Women come for diffuse physical symptoms (headaches, fatigue, digestive problems) without apparent injury. For this reason, the role of physicians and nurses is fundamental in early detection.

Awareness and training are required so that health personnel know how to look beyond the physical symptom and, through humanized treatment and appropriate questions, can suspect a situation of hidden gender-based violence.

Early intervention in the consultation room can be the way out for a woman who is unaware of the nature of her suffering.

The risk of superficial intervention (over-medication)

There is a real danger if the health system limits itself to treating the symptoms without investigating the root cause.

Prescribing anxiolytics, antidepressants or analgesics to calm the woman's discomfort without her discovering the relationship between her ailments and the mistreatment, contributes to the opacity of the problem.

This favors overmedication and the chronification of the patient, who is chemically anesthetized to continue enduring an intolerable situation.

In addition to generating useless health expenditure, this "patch" practice prevents the victim from becoming aware and taking action, since her alarm signals (anxiety, pain) are being artificially silenced by the drugs.

Cumulative impact and mental health

Psychiatrists and psychologists have a key responsibility, as the impact of psychological violence is cumulative.

Multiple episodes of abuse over time generate increasingly severe sequelae that are difficult to reverse.

Identifying the pattern of abuse behind a depressive or anxious condition is vital to avoid misdiagnosis that stigmatizes the patient as "mentally ill," when in fact she is a victim of violent circumstances.

An adequate health intervention not only treats health, but also validates the woman's experience and offers her the necessary res