Bereavement in Childhood and Depressive Psychosis

¹ Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, 7
² Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of Manchester, Manchester, 13

The incidence of childhood bereavement was examined in a series of 200 patients suffering from manic-depressive psychosis. Thirty-nine of those patients (19.5 per cent. of the group) had lost one or both parents before they were aged 15, an incidence which is significantly less than that previously reported in a group of undifferentiated depressives (Brown, 1961) and which does not differ significantly from the control figures in that study. The implications of this finding are discussed.