This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on ISI (3)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Weissman et al¹ reported the consequences of a depressed parent for the offspring. Their conclusion was that the offspring of depressed parents are a high-risk group for onset of anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder in childhood, major depressive disorder in adolescence, and alcohol dependence in adolescence and early adulthood. The authors stated that there has not previously been a follow-up study of the offspring of depressed parents into adulthood that obtained estimates of risk for mental disorders.

We have an ongoing prospective follow-up study of an unselected birth cohort.² During pregnancy, mothers of 12058 infants born in 1966 in northern Finland were asked by a nurse at the antenatal clinic if they felt themselves to be depressed. Of the mothers, 14% felt themselves to be depressed or very depressed at midgestation. The psychiatric morbidity of the offspring has been followed up from the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register. Between the . . . [Full Text of this Article]