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Treating Parent Depression Helps Kids

How Parents' Depression Affects Kids

Weissman's team found that at the beginning of the study, half the kids had a history of psychiatric disorders and a third was currently suffering mental health problems.

The mothers all started treatment with Celexa, an SSRI antidepressant (as did all STAR-D participants).

If the mothers' depression fully lifted, the children's mental health problems decreased by 11%. If the mothers did not fully respond to treatment, their child's psychiatric diagnoses increased by 8%.

For the children who already had a mental health problem, 33% fully recovered -- that is, they lost their psychiatric diagnoses -- if their mothers' depression fully lifted. If the mothers' symptoms did not fully improve, only 12% of the kids fully recovered.

Even more impressive was what happened to children who hadn't yet suffered mental health problems. If the mothers' depression fully lifted, all the kids remained mentally healthy. But among mothers who didn't fully improve, 17% of their children were later diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.

This shows the powerful effect of a parent's depression on a child, says child and family psychiatrist Marilyn B. Benoit, MD, past president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and clinical associate professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

"What you have to consider is, this is affecting the children on a day-to-day basis," Benoit says. "How the parent greets them in the morning sets the tone for their day. And if you have an ill-tempered, angry, or isolated parent, that changes the dynamics of the interaction immediately."

Generations of Depression

These effects are passed from generation to generation.

"In a previous study, we showed that depression was transmitted across generations," Weissman says. "And if a parent and grandparent are depressed, rates of anxiety and depression in the grandchild are very high."

The good news is that successful depression treatment counteracts this effect.

"This is big. Think of a funnel and how the impact of treating parents broadens as you look at their children and grandchildren," Benoit says. "By changing the parents' symptoms and changing the parent-child dynamics from negative to positive, you have affected the trajectory for a whole generation. And over 30 years, I have seen the third generation come along. I have seen how changing the grandparents has made life better for their grandchildren."

Sticking With Treatment

Only a third of the mothers enrolled in the STAR-D trial fully responded to treatment in the first phase of the study. But the whole point of the study is to keep treating patients until something works.

"If you start with antidepressant treatment and don't get full recovery, the story is not over," STAR-D study co-leader Madhukar H. Trivedi, MD, tells WebMD. Trivedi is professor of psychiatry and director of the mood disorders research program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.