Parental Deprivation in Depressive Patients

¹ Lecturer in Psychiatry, University of Leeds

153 depressive in-patients and a matched group of 163 psychiatrically normal controls were compared in order to examine certain aspects of parental deprivation in relation to depressive illness. These are the findings:—

1. Depressives as a whole show no greater liability than a group of control individuals to have lost a parent by death before their 16th birthday.

2. Severe depressives are more liable, and moderately severe depressives less liable, to have lost a parent by death before their 16th birthday as compared with normal controls.

3. Neither death of the father nor death of the mother appears to be of especial importance in the aetiology of depression, and there is no evidence that loss of the mother in early childhood predisposes to depressive illness.

4. There are indications that depressives as a whole are more likely than normal to have lost a father by death during the age period 11 to 15 years and that severe depressives are more likely than normal to have lost a mother by death during their childhood. However, neither of these findings quite reaches the level of statistical significance.

5. Death of a parent during childhood appears no more important in the aetiology of depressive illness than loss of a parent for causes other than death.

6. There is no evidence that death of a sib during the childhood of an individual predisposes him to depressive illness.

7. As compared with the controls, severe depressives report a highly significant excess of disturbed relationship with both mother and father during childhood, whereas moderately severe depressives show no excess over the controls in this respect.

8. Severe depressives have a significantly greater tendency to lose their mother by death before their 26th birthday than do the controls. This appears to be related to a highly significant excess of depressive patients who report that their mother died of cancer. There is no difference between depressives and controls as to the frequency of paternal death due to cancer.

9. It is suggested that medical and surgical out-patients may be a very suitable source of control material for this type of psychiatric investigation.

This article has been cited by other articles:

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