Introduction: Child maltreatment can be divided into emotional, physical, sexual abuse, as well as neglect. Abused children lack confidence and empathy towards other people. They shut themselves in and are often insecure. Maltreatment has an effect on them throughout the lifetime and disturbs their normal development of personality. Objective: To determine the existence of trauma and the exposure to maltreatment in childhood of the clinical group with psychological disturbances and the control group of healthy individuals. Participants and methods: 50 patients, aged 15 to 24, participated in the research. Patients were picked when they had their first examination, control examination or when they were hospitalized for the duration of the research on the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, on the Clinic of Psychiatry of the Clinical Hospital Center Rijeka. The control group included 50 randomly chosen students of School of Medicine of the University of Rijeka and Medical School Rijeka that corresponded to participants of the clinical group in sex and age. All participants filled out a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Childhood maltreatment questionnaire, the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire and Brief Symptom Inventory-53. Results: The clinical group had shown higher statistically significant amount of trauma than the control group (χ 2 = 15.174; df= 1; p < 0.001) and the prevalence of the ailment was higher in those who were abused in childhood (χ 2 = 9.653; df= 1; p < 0.01), whose parents were divorced (χ 2 = 7.143 ; df= 1; p < 0.01) and whose family relationships were worse (χ 2 = 11.592; df= 3; p < 0.01). Conclusion: The clinical group has more psychological disturbances, was more traumatized and more abused during childhood than the control group.