Child Abuse Is Most Costly Health Issue

In Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps The Score", he discusses the ACE study.  If you're not aware of the ACE study, it helps correlate the cause and effect between Child Abuse and the number of health issues these people will face.  I may be paraphrasing this a little too much, but just do a google search on the ACE study and you'll see what I mean.

According to Robert Anda, he realized that through the ACE study, the gravest and most costly public healthy issue in the US is child abuse.  Overall, his calculations showed that the health costs far exceeded those of cancer or heart disease.  If we could eradicate child abuse in the US, we would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three quarters.

Think about this for a minute.  How much care and attention do we really give to child abuse?  Yes, we get worked up when we see Oprah do a story on 200 Male Survivors.  Yes, we give lip service to how horrible it is.  Yes, we think it all just exists only in the Catholic church.  Yet, do we really do much more than that?