1) to determine the correlations of different types and severity of depressive illness in parents and the characteristics of their children at different stages of development; 2) to identify psychosocial and genetic factors which either exacerbate or mitigate the deleterious effects of growing up with a psychiatrically ill parent; 3) to identify psychiatric symptoms and syndromes and adaptational difficulties in children which may be early indicators that a child may go on to develop an affective disorder; 4) to identify neuropsychological abnormalities in children which may be precursors of later psychiatric disorder; 5) to assess the frequency of affective disorder, other psychiatric disorders, and adjustment difficulties and to carefully describe such clinical manifestations in a group of children whose parents have been carefully assessed and found to be suffering from affective disorders; 6) to assess the impact of life events on the coping skills of children at high risk for affective disorders; 7) to identify a cohort of children that will be particularly suitable for longitudinal follow-up; 8) to design, on the basis of our initial findings, models of intervention that can subsequently be tested. Additional information gained through the proposed study will be: 1) a clinical analysis of the types of problems experienced and demonstrated by children at different stages of development and in different life circumstances; 2) the relationship of certain types of affective illness in the parents to possible specific syndromes in the children; 3) the relative strength of genetic versus environmental factors in the production of later illness. Finally, the data gathered by the proposed study can be used as a basis for a long term follow-up study documenting the possible precursors, onset and course of affective disorders as well as shedding new light on the developmental origins of later personality structure.
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