CHICAGO - Researchers say they've shown for the first time that treating a mother's depression can help prevent depression and anxiety disorders in her child, a provocative finding with potentially big public health implications.
The study was small, but the researchers and other experts called it convincing and said it illustrates how important a parent's well-being is to a child.
"It's a very dramatic and important finding," said co-author Dr. A. John Rush, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Depression runs in families and has a strong genetic component, but environmental factors can trigger it. The study results indicate that for children of depressed mothers, that trigger is sometimes their mothers' illness acting up, said lead author Myrna Weissman, a researcher at Columbia University and New York Psychiatric Institute.
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One can site research studies to almost prove any theory to be true. But we must look to overwhelming reasearch and experience. Children become clnically depressed, they have mania, and later in life a number will become schizophrenic. These brain disorders are horrible things. Christians for some reason (not the least being Freud) continue to resist psychiatric treatment. In our book, Broken Minds, Hope for the Healing When You Feel Like Your Losing It, we talk about the pathology of mental diseases. When I first was depressed in 1985, I refused to be treated by a psychiatrist. Most of my fellow Christians told me that it was spiritual. I had obsessions, phobias, panic, etc. But you know what all that went away when I got on the right non-addictive antidepressants.
Oh, who knew? If Mum is chronically sad, it could make the children sad too, and vice-versa. Wow. Give that researcher a nobel prize. Or maybe just a kinder-egg. pah.
Dr. David P Murray | 12/11/2009
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