How Tom Petty Overcame an Abusive Childhood, Heartbreaking Divorce and Heroin Addiction to Find True Love

How Tom Petty Overcame an Abusive Childhood, Heartbreaking Divorce and Heroin Addiction to Find True Love
By Melody Chiu  October 2, 2017

….HIS DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD
Raised in Gainesville, Florida, Petty opened up about suffering abuse at the hands of his father in Petty: The Biography, written by his friend and fellow rocker Warren Zanes.
“When my father got home…he came in, took a belt and beat the living s— out of me. He beat me so bad that I was covered in raised welts, from my head to my toes. I mean, you can’t imagine someone hitting a child like that. My mother and grandmother laid me in my bed, stripped me and they took cotton and alcohol, cleaning these big welts all over my body.”
….Before he found fame, Petty married his longtime friend Jane Benyo in 1974. The duo’s 22-year marriage was filled with drama that stemmed from mental illness, drug use and the singer’s booming career.

Five years before they divorced, Petty told Rolling Stone he was still “very much in love” with Benyo. “There were times when we definitely were not getting along, when we fought like f—ing Apaches, you know. I’m lucky they still let me live in this neighborhood,” he told the outlet.
However, the couple could not work through their issues and split for good in 1996. “I was used to living in hell. My parents’ marriage was hell. I lived through being terribly abused as a kid, and then I found myself in an abusive marriage,” he recalled to Zanes.

HIS DESCENT INTO HEROIN ADDICTION

After Petty and Benyo divorced, the star reconnected with his future wife Dana York, whom he had met years earlier at a concert.

Though the couple fell in love, Petty was struggling with a secret heroin addiction….
“Using heroin went against my grain. I didn’t want to be enslaved to anything. So I was always trying to figure out how to do less, and then that wouldn’t work. Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn’t work. It’s an ugly f—ing thing.”….
http://people.com/music/tom-petty-cardiac-arrest-inside-his-difficult-life/

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3,000 Survivors Form Coalition, Gabon Senator Arrested in Ritual Killing Case, Specific Changes in Brain Structure After Child Abuse

– 3,000 Survivors Form Coalition with Kevin Annett to Fight Child Trafficking
– Gabon Senator Arrested in Ritual Killing Case
– Specific Changes in Brain Structure After Different Forms of Child Abuse

3,000 Survivors Form Coalition with Kevin Annett to Fight Child Trafficking    Child Safety    June 10, 2013 Judy Byington

CEOs of four ritual abuse survivor organizations have joined forces with Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kevin Annett to expose national and international child trafficking networks.

Judy Byington, MSW, LCSW, ret, author of “Twenty-Two Faces” http://www.22faces.com, the biography of human sacrifice survivor Jenny Hill  http://www.youtube.com/wat?v=F626Lsrdwg4 and CEO of Child Abuse Recovery (CAR) http://www.ChildAbuseRecovery.com; Felicity Lee of Ivory Garden: a survivor support group with membership of over 1,700 http://www.igdid.com and Neil Brick, founder of Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse (SMART) http://ritualabuse.us, along with Reverend Annett’s International Tribunal http://www.itccs.org, http://www.itccs.tv, http://www.hiddennolonger.com and http://kevinannettinternational.blogspot.fr/, are compiling evidence of crimes from thousands of survivors across the globe in efforts to bring to trial human trafficking networks and their practice of child exploitation, torture and murder.
http://www.examiner.com/article/3-000-survivors-form-coalition-with-kevin-annett-to-fight-child-trafficking-ring

Gabon Senator Arrested in Ritual Killing Case 09 Jun 2013  REUTERS
A member of Gabon’s senate has been arrested in an investigation into the ritual killing of a 12-year-old girl in the central African nation four years ago, the first time a senior politician has been detained in such a case.

Rising public anger at a spate of ritual killings in Gabon, an oil-rich former French colony on the Gulf of Guinea, sparked a march by thousands of people in the capital Libreville last month after mutilated bodies washed up on beaches, reports Reuters.

President Ali Bongo promised the protesters that anyone convicted of such killings would be jailed for life.

Senator Gabriel Eyeghe Ekomie, who was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in December, was arrested on Friday after failing to appear before a court on May 31, his lawyer said.

Eyeghe Ekomie was summoned for questioning by the court after a man convicted of the girl’s killing said at his trial in May 2012 that he did it on the senator’s orders. Eyeghe Ekomie has denied the accusation….
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/gabon-senator-arrested-in-ritual-killing-case/149818/

Specific Changes in Brain Structure After Different Forms of Child Abuse
June 1, 2013 — Different forms of childhood abuse increase the risk for mental illness as well as sexual dysfunction in adulthood, but little has been known about how that happens. An international team of researchers, including the Miller School’s Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., Leonard M. Miller Professor and Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has discovered a neural basis for this association. The study, published in the June 1 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, shows that sexually abused and emotionally mistreated children exhibit specific and differential changes in the architecture of their brain that reflect the nature of the mistreatment.

Researchers have known that victims of childhood abuse often suffer from psychiatric disorders later in life, including sexual dysfunction following sexual abuse. The underlying mechanisms mediating this association have been poorly understood. Nemeroff and a group of scientists led by Christine Heim, Ph.D., Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology at Charité University of Medicine Berlin, and Jens Pruessner, Ph.D., Director of the McGill Center for Studies in Aging at McGill University in Montreal, hypothesized that cortical changes during segments of mistreatment played a role. To study these potential changes, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the brains of 51 adult women who were exposed to various forms of childhood abuse.

The results showed a correlation between specific forms of maltreatment and thinning of the cortex in precisely the regions of the brain that are involved in the perception or processing of the type of abuse….
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130601133735.htm

Severe abuse in childhood may treble risk of schizophrenia, 30-60% overlap of child maltreatment and domestic violence

Severe abuse in childhood may treble risk of schizophrenia – Research links sexual, physical and emotional abuse, school bullying and parental neglect to schizophrenia in adulthood – Alok Jha, science correspondent  guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012

Children who experience severe forms of abuse are around three times as likely to develop schizophrenia and related psychoses in later life compared with children who do not experience such abuse, according to a study that has brought together psychiatric data from almost 80,000 people.

The results add to a growing body of evidence that childhood maltreatment or abuse can raise the risk of developing mental illnesses in adulthood, including depression, personality disorders and anxiety.

Prof Richard Bentall of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, who led the study, showed that the risk of developing psychosis increased in line with the amount of abuse or trauma a child had gone through, with the most severely affected children having a 50-fold increased risk compared with children who had suffered no abuse. He also showed that the type of trauma experienced in childhood affected the subsequent psychiatric symptoms later in life….

Bentall’s team analysed 36 published studies that contained data on childhood maltreatment (including sexual, physical and emotional abuse, death of a parent, school bullying and neglect) and psychiatric symptoms in almost 80,000 people, collected over the course of 30 years. People who experienced these types of trauma in childhood were between 2.7 and 3 times as likely to develop schizophrenia as adults, the team found. The research is published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin….

The latest results add to recent evidence that childhood abuse can lead to serious problems in later life. In 2011, scientists at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London found that people with a history of abuse or maltreatment during childhood were more than twice as likely to have recurrent episodes of depression in adulthood and also 43% more likely to experience a poor outcome when it came to psychological or drug-based treatment. They examined data from 16 epidemiological studies involving more than 23,000 people in total and 10 clinical trials involving more than 3,000 people

The mechanisms behind the link between childhood maltreatment and schizophrenia are not yet understood. Earlier this year, psychiatrists at Harvard University found that being sexually or emotionally abused as a child correlated with reduced volumes of three important areas of the hippocampus, which is involved in the control of memory and regulation of emotions. Volumes were reduced by up to 6.5%. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/18/severe-abuse-childhood-risk-schizophrenia

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/21/severe-abuse-in-childhood-may-triple-risk-of-schizophrenia/

Childhood Adversities Increase the Risk of Psychosis: A Meta-analysis of Patient-Control, Prospective- and Cross-sectional Cohort Studies

Filippo Varese,  Feikje Smeets, Marjan Drukker, Ritsaert Lieverse, Tineke Lataster, Wolfgang Viechtbauer, John Read, Jim van Os and Richard P. Bentall

Abstract

Evidence suggests that adverse experiences in childhood are associated with psychosis. To examine the association between childhood adversity and trauma (sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, neglect, parental death, and bullying) and psychosis outcome, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsychINFO, and Web of Science were searched from January 1980 through November 2011. We included prospective cohort studies, large-scale cross-sectional studies investigating the association between childhood adversity and psychotic symptoms or illness, case-control studies comparing the prevalence of adverse events between psychotic patients and controls using dichotomous or continuous measures, and case-control studies comparing the prevalence of psychotic symptoms between exposed and nonexposed subjects using dichotomous or continuous measures of adversity and psychosis. The analysis included 18 case-control studies (n = 2048 psychotic patients and 1856 nonpsychiatric controls), 10 prospective and quasi-prospective studies (n = 41?803) and 8 population-based cross-sectional studies (n = 35?546). There were significant associations between adversity and psychosis across all research designs, with an overall effect of OR = 2.78 (95% CI = 2.34–3.31). The integration of the case-control studies indicated that patients with psychosis were 2.72 times more likely to have been exposed to childhood adversity than controls (95% CI = 1.90–3.88). The association between childhood adversity and psychosis was also significant in population-based cross-sectional studies (OR = 2.99 [95% CI = 2.12–4.20]) as well as in prospective and quasi-prospective studies (OR = 2.75 [95% CI = 2.17–3.47]). The estimated population attributable risk was 33% (16%–47%). These findings indicate that childhood adversity is strongly associated with increased risk for psychosis.http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/03/28/schbul.sbs050

full article  http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/03/28/schbul.sbs050.full

The 30-60% overlap of child maltreatment and domestic violence in families indicates a need for child protection policy and practice that reflects this co-occurrence. In 2009, the NRCCPS collaborated with the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) to publish Child and Family Service Review Outcomes: Strategies to Improve Domestic Violence Responses in CFSR Program Improvement Plans to help child protection agencies develop and implement policy and best practice respond to the need for improving and deepening the child pro identified in the CFSR process.  http://nrccps.org/special-initiatives/domestic-violence/

72 charged in online child pornography ring, Violence Against Women and effects

“the bulletin board distributed the equivalent of 16,000 DVDs of child pornography, adding that the department had recovered more than 1 million images in the U.S. alone.”

“In the United States, more than 20 percent of women have experienced intimate-partner violence, stalking or both. A full 17 percent have reported rape or attempted rape, according to background information in the study.”

72 charged in online child pornography ring

Fifty-two have been arrested in the U.S. and abroad and 13 have pleaded guilty in the case, the result of a crackdown by the Justice and Homeland Security departments. Twenty remain at large.
By Andrew Seidman, Washington Bureau
August 3, 2011

Reporting from Washington—
The Justice Department has charged 72 suspected members of an online child pornography ring that encouraged its members to engage in sexual acts with children 12 and under and submit gruesome, violent material to build a massive private database of images and videos on the Internet.

The crackdown is the result of a joint effort by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security launched in December 2009 to target about 500 people in 13 countries on five continents for their suspected participation in “Dreamboard,” a members-only online bulletin board that was created to encourage the sharing of graphic images and videos.

“The members of this criminal network shared a demented dream to create the preeminent online community for the promotion of child sexual exploitation,” Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement, “but for the children they victimized, this was nothing short of a nightmare.”

According to court documents filed in Louisiana, where the ring originated, administrators for Dreamboard set up strict barriers to entry and created a sophisticated membership system that offered incentives for further contributions to the website. Individuals had to post child pornography in order to join the site. To maintain membership, individuals were required to continue to upload images of sexual abuse….

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the bulletin board distributed the equivalent of 16,000 DVDs of child pornography, adding that the department had recovered more than 1 million images in the U.S. alone.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-na-child-porn-20110804,0,5337258.story

Violence Against Women Can Take Lifelong Toll: Study
Research shows how rates of mental and physical illness rise, quality of life falls

By Serena Gordon HealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, Aug. 2 (HealthDay News)

Women who’ve suffered from gender-based violence are more likely to develop anxiety disorders or other mental woes, experience physical and mental disabilities, and have worse quality of life than other women, new research shows.

Gender-based violence includes rape and other forms of sexual assault, intimate-partner violence (such as spouse abuse) and stalking.

Risks for these long-term problems rose with the intensity of abuse. For example, women who’d experienced three or four types of gender-based violence had 10 times the odds of developing an anxiety disorder than women who haven’t experienced such violence, the study found. The odds of a woman who’d been subjected to such violence developing a substance abuse problem were almost six times higher than for a woman who hasn’t experienced gender-based violence….

Results of the study are published in the Aug. 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association….

In the United States, more than 20 percent of women have experienced intimate-partner violence, stalking or both. A full 17 percent have reported rape or attempted rape, according to background information in the study.

The data for Rees’ study came from a national survey done in Australia on mental health and well-being. The survey included over 4,400 women between the ages of 16 and 85 years old.

In that group, 1,218 women (27 percent) reported experiencing at least one form of gender-based violence, while 139 had been exposed to three or more forms of gender-based violence.

The average age that women were first raped was 13 years old and 12 years old for sexual assault. The average age that women were beaten by a partner or stalked was 22 years old.

The more violence a woman was exposed to, the greater her risk of developing mental illnesses, according to the study.

http://consumer.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=655484