Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesFamily Discord and Stress Predictors of Depression and Other Disorders in Adolescent Children of Depressed and Nondepressed Women
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.