Is Depression Inherited?
some of my happiest moments have been spent as a mother. I say this despite being a constitutionally unhappy person who has fought all her life against an encroaching darkness — and not always successfully. Those moments stretch back decades — to, say, summer mornings in a rented cottage on Block Island, when I, an inveterate late sleeper, would be awakened shortly past dawn by my 10-month-old daughter, Zoë, standing up in her crib, cheerfully gurgling at me, raring to begin the day. And they are as recent as last week when Zoë, now 22, and I engaged in one of our long analytical talks about the movie we had just watched, and I was struck by the ways in which her mind works differently from mine and by certain perceptual habits we have in common.
My battles with chronic depression have landed me in a psychiatric unit several times since my daughter was born. She was 6 months old when I was first hospitalized, 7 years old the second time, and 18 the last time. I worry about the impact on her of those separations, relatively short as they were, and I worry more about the effect of living with a mother who often fights to keep afloat. (I have been divorced from Zoë’s father since she was about 4, and we have spent large periods of one-on-one time together.) Although I know that depression is not something you can catch from another person, like chickenpox, I fear that my susceptibility will somehow “rub off” on my daughter — that she might pattern her responses to life’s inevitable difficulties after my own.
I will never forget the time when she was a little girl, no more than 6 or 7, and announced one evening after I had gotten angry with her about something, that she was taking a kitchen knife to bed in order to kill herself. I remember that she was wearing her favorite pajamas, which were imprinted with pink bows, when she said this and how incongruous such a declaration seemed, coming from someone whose bedtime was 7:30.
I have been thinking about such matters lately because of the comedian Sarah Silverman’s remark on a TV talk show that she didn’t want to have a child of her own and preferred to adopt for fear of passing on her depression. Much as I sympathize with Ms. Silverman’s trepidations (assuming they were meant to be taken seriously), I think they suggest the undue influence we assign to genetic determinability. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, one that can be accounted for by the latest pendulum swing in the nature versus nurture debate.
So how heritable is depression? There is no single genetic marker for it; current research shows that multiple genes probably contribute simultaneously to its chances of being transmitted. Research is hard in this area because we can’t perform the perfect experiment — separating identical twins at birth and raising them in different homes to see which get depressed and which don’t. Scientists can, however, compare identical twins (conceived from the same egg and sperm) with fraternal twins (conceived from different eggs and sperm) and see how they differ. Such twin studies have recently concluded that the heritability of depression is about 40 percent.
Until more compelling genetic information becomes available, it seems that the best we can do is to keep our children’s predispositions in mind while focusing on the pieces of the developmental puzzle over which we can exert control. (This includes being attuned to your child’s nature, especially when it differs from your own.)
Betwixt my lurches into the dark, I gave my daughter a lot of love, which my own parents weren’t capable of doing (a fact I take to be at the root of my own depression, given that neither of them was depressed). These days, Zoë’s no longer the bright-eyed early riser she was as an infant, and she’s got her share of problems, just like the rest of us. But, so far a lifelong case of the blues does not appear to be one of them.
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