Relationship between Mental Illness and Family History

Relationship between Mental Illness and Family History
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Relationship between Mental Illness and Family History
This paper will explore the link between family backgrounds and mental disorders, with a specific focus on depressive and mood disorders. The relationship between familial history and various psychiatric conditions is a critical point of scientific research. It raises concerns regarding the root cause of mental disorders that continue to affect millions of people worldwide. Parental risk factors, family environment, and familial engagement are core concepts and elements that are used to guide the diagnosis and management of psychiatric disorders.
Family mental history and parental depression, especially maternal depression and parental bonding, could determine the propensity for developing depressive symptoms later in life among children. Diverse mood problems such as bipolar disorders do not have a precise cause, but variations in various genetic materials and interaction with environmental variables would likely intricately interact to increase a person’s risks of developing bipolar disorder. Some environmental factors also play a role in triggering their symptoms. The risk factors for developing depression can entail biological and environmental factors. Having a family member experiencing major depression may likely impact the family environment where the risk of others being affected by almost similar symptoms increases. 
Mental problems revolving around emotional and behavioral disturbances are often linked to genetic and environmental factors such as the family. According to Psychiatry Advisor, family history of psychiatric problems highly correlates with the incidence of multiple mental disorders in offspring. In one of the studies, findings showed that there was a multi-generational effect where depression in grandparents and or great-grandparents increased the risk for depression in offspring from about 12.6% to approximately 41.4% and the illness that occurred 2 and 3 generations previously was almost always the same type of illness that emerged in the offspring (Psychiatry Advisor). According to the HCPLive website, mood disturbances and depressive disorders suggest that familial psychiatric history could correlate with the risk of severe bipolar disorder in a person. In a study, the researchers concluded that familial psychiatric history correlated with various disease severities such as hospitalizations, suicide ideations and attempts, and earlier onset (HCPLive). With their severities, these disorders can be modified or aggravated by socio-demographic indicators like low education and household income.
Family functioning includes variables such as cohesion, harmony and the competency of resolving conflicting problems tend to affect mood and depressive disorders later in life amongst children. These features can impact on child's experiences and life journey via modulating the emotional development during childhood. Thus, the family setup reflects a critical early contributor to the risk of mood disturbances. Within family environments, people experience heterogeneous life events and activities daily, but some people develop typica...