Early Parent Death and Mental Illness

Abstract

Environmentalists have long attempted to demonstrate relationships between various deficiencies in upbringing and adult mental illness. Early parent death is one of the most obvious and one of the most easily measured of such deficiencies, and many investigators have been tempted to the deceptively simple task of comparing the incidence of early parent death in patients and the general population. That there is so little agreement in the findings of the now considerable number of studies is a reflection of the methodological pitfalls which exist.