Nongenetic Familial Transmission of Psychiatric Disorders? Evidence from Children of Holocaust Survivors

There is considerable evidence that psychiatric disorders aggregate in families, a phenomenon for which both genetic and nongenetic explanations have been proposed. However, since genetic and social inheritance usually co-occur, it is difficult to separate out their effects. In this paper, we argue that examining the rates of disorder among children of Holocaust survivors provides a special situation where genetic and nongenetic factors in familial transmission can be separated, and where specific nongenetic mechanisms can be tested. We specify competing hypotheses, and test their viability using data from an epidemiological study of psychiatric disorders conducted in Israel. We find no evidence of higher symptom scale scores or higher rates of current psychiatric disorders for the children of Holocaust survivors. However, they did have higher rates of past disorders.