Stephen Gilman, former HSPH doctoral student in Health and Social Behavior and current research fellow in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at HSPH, presented his findings at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans in May. The data was also the cornerstone of his thesis, "Socioeconomic Disparities in Major Depression Throughout the Life Course," which he presented in April.

Other contributors to the study were Ichiro Kawachi, director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health and associate professor in the Department of Health and Social Behavior, Stephen Buka, associate professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health, and Garrett Fitzmaurice, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics.

"The study refines our knowledge of the association between socioeconomic status and psychiatric disorders, with the additional public health implication that social inequalities and depression have their roots early in life," said Gilman.

Gilman used data from the Providence, Rhode Island site of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. The multi-site, national project, conducted from 1959 to 1974 by the National Institutes of Health, gathered detailed information about birth outcomes and child development trends throughout the first seven years of life.

In the mid-1980s, Buka initiated a series of follow-up studies of more than 1,400 of the 4,140 children who had been enrolled in the Providence project in the 1960s and who had since grown up. Buka investigated the long-term psychiatric consequences of delivery complications and learning disabilities, collecting information about a range of psychiatric conditions including depression.

More than a decade later, Gilman, in collaboration with Buka, spotted a unique opportunity to examine childhood environmental determinants of major depression.

Gilman found that children of divorced parents or of families that moved three or more times before the child turned seven were more likely to become depressed before the age of 14 than children of intact, more stable families.

In addition, children from low socioeconomic backgrounds had an elevated risk of depression throughout their lifetimes, even if they had become more professionally successful than their parents.

The study also suggests that girls raised in working-class households are more likely to develop depression as adults than boys in similar households.

"The findings are consistent with a number of previous studies," said Gilman. "What this work adds to the scientific literature is a prospective design that permitted the measurement of childhood environments long before depression emerged."

Gilman was careful to point out that the majority of participants in the study did not develop depression, indicating that childhood factors are only part of the story of major depression. However, said Gilman, "the identification of risks for depression early in life reinforces the importance of childhood experiences for adult health and may be one avenue towards the reduction of social inequalities in psychiatric disorders."