A recent study of mental illnesses amongst parents of autistic children provides some ominous echos of Bruno Bettelheim. The study, “Parental psychiatric disorders associated with autism spectrum disorders in the offspring,” appears in the May 5, 2008, issue of the journal Pediatrics. The authors gathered data from Swedish medical and hospital registers of children with autism diagnoses before 10 years of age and matched with a control population. Parent diagnoses were based on an inpatient hospital diagnostic evaluation and included schizophrenia, other nonaffective psychoses, affective disorders, neurotic and personality disorders and other nonpsychotic disorders, alcohol and drug addiction and abuse, and autism.
The study found that "for both parents, schizophrenia was associated with autism. For other disorders, such as depression and nonpsychotic personality disorders, the positive association between psychiatric disorders and childhood autism was found only for maternal disorders, not for paternal disorders."
The authors concluded that the study results results "support the hypothesis that there is a familial predisposition, perhaps genetic, that presents differently in the parent than in the child and probably requires a constellation of other genetic or environmental factors for expression."
The authors of the study themselves note a number of study design limitations but it should be interesting to see the reaction to the authors' conclusions. In pointing to a connection between autism and parental mental issues, particularly the association between autism and maternal depression and nonpsychotic personality disorders, the authors appear to be retracing the steps taken by Bruno Bettelheim whose "refrigerator mothers" theories of autism causality caused so much harm to families with autistic children. Hopefully this study and the conclusions arising therefrom, will be given as much rigorous study and discussion as others pointing to possible causes of autism.