Quote:
Originally Posted by lolagrace
When I was in the hospital, one of the education classes I attended was taught by a really awesome and knowledgeable psychologist. According to him, research has shown that for those of us with mental illness, at least one other relative will be found with mental illness; however, that can be as far back as 7 generations statistically which makes it hard to discover since often older generations didn't seek out professional evaluation/help for mental illness. For chemical dependency/addictions, statistically you rarely have to go back more than 3 generations to find a relative with addiction. The one thing I never got from him was the actual studies/literature he was getting that information from, but it does seem to illustrate the difficulty of discovering the family correlation for serious mental illness; it just may have been so far back and most of us know very little of our families beyond 3 or 4 generations at best.
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At least it'll never be 100% (if it's estimated/established using statistics) and if you look at it statistically, the likelihood that it's not pure chance that you'll find someone with a mental disorder most probably
decreases with every generation. So it might be true, but not significant. Logical. Obvious. Unimportant. Meaningless.
It's more likely he bases it on research that claims to show (or is cited as claiming in the popular press, mostly as "research has shown...") that everyone and any other person, knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that other person. The theory behind it predicts there are six degrees of separation between every two persons.
Even if that were true, it's meaningless (for our purposes and just mostly). And it's not about generations but people knowing people. Maybe that's the reason for the seventh link/relation. It's an interesting theory either way, but it means that there couldn't be any scientific evidence that people with relatives going back for seven generations with mental illness have anything in common other than being or having been, alive.
