Lifestyle Choices

If you have a history of depression in your family, statistically the chances are higher that you may be prone to periods of depression. How much of this correlation is hereditary and how much environmental cannot be answered quantitatively. Although there has been some dogmatic insistence on hereditary factors by geneticists, and on environmental factors by psychotherapists, most will at least agree that susceptibility to depression is affected by both heredity and by early environment, whatever the proportions. These influences weave a complicated and inextricable pattern: a depressed parent may pass on hereditary qualities of susceptibility to the children, but the children will also learn by copying the behaviour of their parent. Depression occurs much more frequently in certain types of personality, and personality is affected by hereditary factors, by copying parents and by reactions to the family environment. The family environment is affected by the general culture, which may be more or less depressive.

All these influences work together, and yet sometimes, a child of a severely depressive parent, born in depressive and hopeless circumstances and raised in a depressive culture, will grow into an adult full of hope and inspiration, who never experiences a single bout of significant depression.

Heredity

This subject is included here, rather than under “Physical factors“, because family influences, whether hereditary or environmental, are usually inseparable in practice.

Many studies have pointed to genetic influence in depression. These studies have mostly been done on severe depression. If any of your parents, siblings or children have ha& black or white depression, the chances of your having it at some time in your life are in the order of 10-15 per cent.

This compares with a risk in the general population of about 0.5-0.8 per cent.

Most research shows that the hereditary influence in manic depression is stronger than that in repeated black or white depression, and this fact has led to the suggestion that manic depression and repeated severe depression may be different entities. Manic depressives tend to have a more extroverted and cyclothymic personality and an earlier onset of the first episode of depression or mania. Manic depression is equally common in men and women, whereas depression is commoner in women. If one of your parents or siblings has had manic depression, you are much more likely to get manic depression than just depression (within your 10-15 per cent chance of being affected at all). In other words, manic depression and periodic depression each tend to breed true, though there is some overlap.

All these comments and figures refer to severe depression. It is probable that hereditary influence is relatively more important with black or white depression. At any rate, it is almost impossible to measure hereditary influence with milder depressions since they are so much harder to define and quantify. How you interpret the figures is open to question. Using the figures given above, you could say that having a severely depressive parent gives you only a 10 per cent chance of being similarly affected — or you could say that having a severely depressive parent increases your chances of being severely depressed by thirtyfold.

Learning By Copying

Children learn by copying what they see. Thus they learn to talk in the same manner as one or other of their parents without ever consciously trying to copy. Such unconscious mimicry, which can be funny, delightful and quite surprising, also has a problematic side: children copy the worst aspects of their parents as much as they do the best. Since parents are naturally looked up to as models of perfection, it is not possible for a young child to be discriminating or selective. Thus aspects of life which are repressed by the parents become repressed by the children.

If there is no expression of fun at home, the children learn to be serious and sombre, lacking in fun and perhaps disapproving of others’ jollity. If there is no expression of sensuality at home, the children learn to repress their natural tendencies to touch and enjoy physical sensation. If sexuality is never mentioned or talked about only with embarrassment or disapproval, the children learn to repress their sexuality and may lose their capacity for sexual intimacy.

If there is never any overt aggression at home, the children learn to repress aggressive impulses. When they are adults and a situation arises that would normally create an angry response, the level of repression is required to be increased, to make sure that the angry feeling is held in. So it is that something that would make most people feel angry makes a depressive depressed.

The more reactions that were repressed in the home of your parents, the less interaction there was between you and your parents and the less available “feeling energy”. Children are extremely sensitive to the amount of energy allowed in a household and unconsciously adapt themselves to fit in.

Life patterns

Copying is especially strong from boy to man and from girl towoman. A little boy looks up to his father as the model ofmasculinity and a little girl looks up to her mother as everything a woman should be. Although both boy and girl maylater rebel against some of the overt attitudes of their parents,they will not usually rebel against the attitudes they do not know about. So it is that a woman, for example, may find herself saying “I’ll never do what my mother did” and yet, without realizing it, she will say those words with the same tone of voice, the same expression and the same gestures as her mother. And sometimes she will find that her life begins to go the same way as her mother’s, despite conscious efforts to make it different. For example, a girl sees her mother giving up an enjoyable life and progressively losing her spirits after the age of 30, as she becomes increasingly tied down to family life. When the girl becomes an adult, she thinks: “Whatever I do I won’t let that happen to me”. At the age of 30 she is married with two children but keeps an outside job. Quite inexplicably, it seems, she finds herself feeling down — somehow she is plagued by an irrational and unconscious thought: it is not possible for a married woman over 30 to feel good. If this thought becomes conscious, that is a help, because it can then be dealt with. On the surface it seems to be a silly thought, because of course not all women are like her mother and there is no necessary reason why she should be. But this thought was formed when she was a child when, to her, her mother represented all women.

More often still, children follow the basic emotional attitudes and ways of expression of their parents. A father may not need to say to a boy “It’s babyish to cry” — the boy picks up his attitude and copies, just as his own son will copy him.

Thus the patterns of what is allowable and what is repressed are passed on from generation to generation.

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