Broken Homes and Mental Disorder

Abstract

A LMOST all the social ills to which man is A heir have been laid at the door of the broken home, including juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, and mental disease. Data from the Midtown Community Health Study of Manhattan, New York City, suggests that homes broken in childhood are related to mental health only under certain conditions. This paper specifies some of these conditions. The Midtown area of Manhattan and the metho,ds used to study it are described in Health in the Metropolis (1). A second volume, Life Stress and Mental Health, which deals with broken homels and other potential stresses, will be published soon (2). To brief those not familiar with the study, Midtown is a section of Manhattan adjacent to the main business area. Ninety-nine percent of the residents are white, and they are equally divided among native Newv Yorkers, Americanborn migrants to New York, and foreign-born immigrants., principally German, Irish, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, and British. There is a wide range of socioeconomic status (SES). The data presented in this paper are derived from interviews of a random sample of 1,660 persons among the 111,000 residents aged 20 to 59 years. The 2-hour questionnaire used in the interviews contained more than 100 questions about psychiatric symptoms and some 300 covering sociocultural background and attitudes. A summary of symptonis for each person was rated for severity of symptoms and degree of impairment by two psychiatrists working independently. AMental heialth (MH) rating I was made on the basis of the respondent's symptoms alone, along with his age, sex, and marital status. MH rating II was made on the basis of additional information on the sociocultural background (including broken homes) and role funietioning of the respondent. For our purposes, the rating has been translated into a statistic called the ridit, ranging from 0 to 1. MH I ridits were used in all final tables, since they were methodologically less contaminated than MII II ridits. The latter were used in preliminary screening tables. The average mental health risk for all Midtowners is 0.50. The larger the ridit, the worse the mental health rating.