ABSTRACT
Human psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, eating problems, schizophrenia, and personality disturbance, aggregates within families and occurs across generations (Amone-P’Olak, Burger, Huisman, Oldehinkel, and Ormel, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2012; Moore, Whaley, and Sigman, 2004; Turner, Beidel, Roberson-Nay, and Tervo, 2003; Waugh and Bulik, 1999). Parental psychopathology affects parents’ and children’s development and functioning through many different avenues that are not yet well-identified or understood. Over the last several decades, research examining the implications of parental psychopathology for children’s development has continued to demonstrate that the pathways of influence are dynamic, multiple, and highly complex. The nature of parental psychopathology inevitably varies in terms of timing, frequency, duration, severity, chronicity, symptom constellation, and comorbidity. Direct pathways can involve genetic or hereditary mechanisms that predate the child’s birth, biological mechanisms occurring during pregnancy or following birth, and social interactive mechanisms that begin at birth and continue across childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Indirect pathways also include the processes of mediation and moderation. Parental psychopathology may predispose a parent to cognitions or behaviors that may, in turn, trigger a series of mediating factors or events that then influence a child’s psychosocial adjustment in ways that predispose the child to a related disorder. Parental psychopathology may also be influenced by distal (e.g., socioeconomic, historical, or cultural) or proximal (e.g., family configuration, marital relationship, availability of social and emotional support, or child characteristics) environmental factors or events, that then moderate its influence on children’s development and functioning. Finally, how a parent or child understands a parent’s mental illness, and how a society or culture embraces or rejects it, can also have profound effects for parents and children.
