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Family Discord and Stress Predictors of Depression and Other Disorders in Adolescent Children of Depressed and Nondepressed Women

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ABSTRACT

Objective

To test the hypothesis that family stress variables are associated with the effects of maternal depression on offspring diagnoses and examined whether such factors may be differentially associated with disorders in offspring of depressed and never-depressed women.

Method

Eight hundred sixteen mothers and their 15-year-old children in an Australian community completed cross-sectional assessments of mother and youth diagnoses, interviewer-rated and self-reported quality of marital relationship/status, quality of parent–child relationship, and interviews for youth chronic and episodic stress. Women with depression histories were oversampled and included 458 never-depressed and 358 women with current or past major depressive episodes or dysthymic disorder.

Results

Significant interaction effects were found between maternal depression and family discord/stress variables such that high levels of environmental risk factors were significantly associated with youth depression in children of depressed women compared with low levels of adverse conditions and were generally less associated with depression in children of nondepressed women. Nondepressive disorders were associated with adverse family and stress factors for both groups of children.

Conclusions

The results are consistent with a multiple risk factor model of depression transmission in high-risk families and suggest a pattern of reactivity to adverse conditions among children of depressed women. The results suggest that psychosocial factors may contribute to diagnoses in offspring of depressed women in community samples.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants in the current cross-sectional analyses were a subset of 816 women and their 15-year-old adolescents selected from a birth cohort study of children (N = 7,775) born between 1981 and 1984 at the Mater Misericordiae Mother's Hospital in Brisbane, Queensland (Keeping et al., 1989). Mothers had provided information about themselves and their children during pregnancy, after delivery, and at the child's ages 6 months and 2 years. Sixty-eight percent of the original sample still lived in

RESULTS

Means and correlations among youth and family stress/discord measures are presented in Table 1. Generally small correlations suggest that the variables are related but represent different aspects of family discord and stress. Comparisons between depressed and nondepressed mother groups revealed significant differences on these variables with greater adversity observed in the families of depressed women, as shown in Table 2, with the exception of youth ratings of maternal warmth and father

DISCUSSION

Results of this study indicate that family conflict and stress variables play an important role in depressive disorders in children of depressed women. Significant interactions of stress variables and maternal depression indicated that when family discord was low, there was little difference in depression rates among offspring of depressed and nondepressed mothers. Overall, there were significantly greater conflict and stress among families with a depressed mother. However, when both groups of

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    This work was funded by NIH grant R01 MH522239 to Drs. Brennan and Hammen. The authors are grateful for the assistance of the Brisbane project staff Robyne LeBrocque, Cheri Dalton, Barbara Mann, Eileen Tone, Sandra Fergusson, Molly Robbins, and Lisa Manning. They also thank Bill Bor, Jake Najman, Michael O'Callaghan, and Gail Williams for their contributions to the longitudinal study of the MUSP birth cohort.

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