RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Parental separation in childhood as a risk factor for depression in adulthood: a community-based study of adolescents screened for depression and followed up after 15 years Hannes Bohman 1,2,3,4* , Sara Brolin Låftman 5 , Aivar Päären 1 and Ulf Jonsson 1,3 Abstract Background: Earlier research has investigated the association between parental separation and long-term health outcomes among offspring, but few studies have assessed the potentially moderating role of mental health status in adolescence. The aim of this study was to analyze whether parental separation in childhood predicts depression in adulthood and whether the pattern differs between individuals with and without earlier depression. Methods: A community-based sample of individuals with adolescent depression in 1991–93 and matched non-depressed peers were followed up using a structured diagnostic interview after 15 years. The participation rate was 65% (depressed n = 227; non-depressed controls n = 155). Information on parental separation and conditions in childhood and adolescence was collected at baseline. The outcome was depression between the ages 19–31 years; information on depression was collected at the follow-up diagnostic interview. The statistical method used was binary logistic regression. Results: Our analyses showed that depressed adolescents with separated parents had an excess risk of recurrence of depression in adulthood, compared with depressed adolescents with non-separated parents. In addition, among adolescents with depression, parental separation was associated with an increased risk of a switch to bipolar disorder in adulthood. Among the matched non-depressed peers, no associations between parental separation and adult depression or bipolar disorder were found. Conclusions: Parental separation may have long-lasting health consequences for vulnerable individuals who suffer from mental illness already in adolescence. Keywords: Adolescence, Divorce, Family type, Family structure, Depression, Prospective, Bipolar Background Numerous cross-sectional studies have shown that chil- dren who do not live with two original parents in the same household report poorer mental health outcomes com- pared with their peers in nuclear families [1–3], although the overall effect sizes are rather small [4]. Prospective studies of the association between parental separation in childhood and later mental health have demonstrated that individuals with separated parents are more likely to suffer from adverse mental health outcomes in adulthood [5–10]. There are however also studies that do not show such a relationship. One Swedish prospective study demonstrated that individuals with divorced parents were more likely to appear in child and ado- lescent psychiatric care compared with their peers with non-divorced parents, but that there was no dif- ference between the groups with regard to adult * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Neuroscience, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Uppsala University, Box 593, SE-75124 Uppsala, Sweden 2 Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Akademiska sjukhuset, SE-75185 Uppsala, Sweden Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Bohman et al. BMC Psychiatry (2017) 17:117 DOI 10.1186/s12888-017-1252-z
Parental separation in childhood as a risk factor for depression in adulthood: a community-based study of adolescents screened for depression and followed up after 15 years
Jul 09, 2023
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