Abuse doesn't have to be purely physical, nor is it solely the remit of the mentally well. Punching walls and breaking things (strangely never their own property) is designed to intimidate and no one deserves to be afraid in their own home that breaking things might escalate to breaking them.
In the example you offered it's down to the individual to say whether she personally considered it abuse, although it's important to remember with domestic violence that victims often have a skewed perspective of what counts as 'acceptable', their sense of danger is essentially recalibrated. Gavin DeBecker used an interesting example in the Gift of Fear where a woman was on the phone to the police about her violent husband and when they asked if she was in immediate danger she answered no, because in her mind he wasn't actively strangling her and the fact that he was the other side of the door with a loaded gun didn't really register as 'danger' in the same way.
I think with mental illness, particularly given the socialisation we all can't quite shake off, women are often expected to make themselves more agreeable and to make allowances for crappy behaviour from men where there are 'justifications'. It's quite telling with a lot of abuse, even where it hasn't yet escalated to physical violence, that the 'he can't control himself' is somehow limited to his partner, because the abuser recognises that if he acted like that at work he'd be fired.
