Unhappy mother, unhappy child

An unhappy Mother makes an unhappy child, according to the results of a study just published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

A high percentage of mothers who brought their children in for evaluation or treatment of depression at a psychiatric clinic at Columbia University in New York City were themselves mentally disturbed. One-third of mothers who were seeking psychiatric help for their depressed children (aged 13 years old on average) were suffering from one or more current psychiatric disorders. Of 117 mothers, 14 per cent screened positive for major depression, 17 per cent for panic disorder, 17 per cent for generalised anxiety disorder, 2 per cent for alcohol abuse and 1 per cent for drug abuse. In addition, 22 per cent of the mothers reported suicidal thoughts or thoughts of self-harm within the past two weeks, and 43 per cent had psychiatric symptoms that did not meet the diagnostic threshold for any of these disorders.

Yet only 17 per cent of all mothers rated their overall emotional health as being "fair to poor". "To our knowledge, this is the first published study to document the presence of current depressive symptoms in mothers bringing their offspring for evaluation or treatment of depression," the authors of the report stated.

Two-thirds of the depressed children had mentally healthy mothers - so what else was going wrong? What we need now is a similar study looking at the mental health of fathers.