Loss in childhood: Anxiety in adulthood

Abstract

Recent research, especially in Great Britain, has attracted interest by reporting on the relationship between maternal loss and vulnerability to depression among women. Several studies in the United States that included men have not received equal attention. The present study expands on the US work by reporting findings from the Queensbrook Study in New York City, a cross-sectional survey that provides information about the relationships between the family environment of childhood and the prevalence of psychiatric illness in adulthood. The Queensbrook survey was conducted in the mid 1960s as an urban counterpart to the Stirling County Study in rural Atlantic Canada. The data from the urban sample described here were not published earlier, and for this report we used DSM-III criteria to develop scoring algorithms to identify depression and anxiety. We investigated several types of adverse childhood losses, not solely the death of a mother, and related them to depression and anxiety in both men and women. None of the childhood experiences was significantly associated with these disorders among women, nor was the death of a parent related to either type of disorder among men. However, boys who left home before 16 years of age, whose parents were divorced or separated, or who were placed in an adopted family had a threefold increase in rates of anxiety as adults. This finding of a positive association between the divorce of parents and later anxiety in men is supported by several of the other population surveys carried out in the United States.