More than 1 in 5 Americans live with at least one mental health issue. Around half have a second or third mental illness as well, and a third have four or more mental health diagnoses. What does that mean for the next generation?
At Genesis Psychiatric Solutions, board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Ifeanye Olele treats all types of mental health conditions and can order genetic testing to discover what medications will help you most.
Here’s what he has to share about the potential inheritability of mental health issues.
Many metal illnesses have been found to share common genetic signatures. In fact, researchers have found that five underlying genomic factors involving 238 genetic variants are shared by 14 different psychiatric disorders.
What that means is that these signatures show up as the main difference between people who have one of the disorders and people who don’t.
Does this mean your kids will have the same mental health issues you do, since they share a large part of your genetic makeup? Not necessarily. You only get half of your genetic makeup from one parent, and genetics aren’t the only factor at play when it comes to mental health.
Mental illnesses are affected by multifactorial inheritance, which means that both genetics and environment are involved in whether a child develops a mental illness.
Examples of environmental factors include:
People can have one or both parents with mental health issues, but never express any signs of mental illness themselves. Others can show signs early in life, either mirroring their parent’s illness or showing signs of a different psychological disorder.
Some mental illnesses have been studied more heavily than others when it comes to inheritability factors and genetics passing down from parent to child.
More than 10% or more of adults in the United States risk experiencing at least one episode of major depressive disorder (MDD) in their lives. Among children with a parent or sibling with MDD, the risk can rise to 30%.
If the sibling or parent had recurrent episodes of MDD and their depression started early in life, the child’s risk can rise to 50%.
One study looked at the rate of bipolar spectrum disorder (BD) in the children of parents with bipolar I or II. Compared with the children of parents without BD, who only developed BD at the rate of 0.8%, children with a parent who had BD developed BD of their own at the rate of 10.6%.
If both parents had BD, the rate of BD in children rose to 29%.
The chance of passing on a mental health issue to your children can be just as worrying as the chance of passing on an inheritable physical health issue.
But unlike many inheritable physical conditions, mental health disorders depend on environmental factors as much as they do genetics. This can significantly lower the risk of inheritability.
If you have a mental health issue and are planning a family but are worried about passing your condition on to your children, Dr. Olele is here to help. Contact us by calling our office closest to you or requesting a consultation online. We’re located in Fairfax and Alexandria, Virginia, and in Washington, DC.
