Reacción a "Reactions: Research finds that children of people with mental disorders are at increased risk of developing these and other disorders"

Epidemiological studies in psychiatry are very controversial. Diagnoses of mental disorders are made with very soft data: the assessment of human subjectivity by another subjectivity, be it that of a clinical interview or a questionnaire. There are no objective measures, laboratory tests, imaging, genetic tests, or any biomarkers that discriminate the diagnosis of a mental disorder. With this background, an article published in The Lancet Psychiatry on 30 July 2023 has stated that half of the population will develop at least one mental disorder during their lifetime out of the thirteen they analysed.  

The study just published in World Psychiatry is along the same lines of diagnostic inflation and inaccuracy in its determination. The results reveal that 55% of offspring of parents diagnosed with any mental disorder will develop some form of mental disorder in their lifetime, with a confidence interval of no less than 7% to 95%. When estimating absolute risks by diagnosis, the same vagueness is maintained: the offspring of parents diagnosed with psychosis will be diagnosed with any mental disorder in their lifetime by 17%, with a confidence interval between 1% and 82%. 

These imprecise figures also do not allow any genetic counselling to be considered, as the authors seem to suggest, since the association between diagnoses of mental disorders and biological inheritance has not been demonstrated, but the environment is crucial in the onset of mental suffering. The primary prevention in mental health proposed by the WHO is to establish policies that act on the social determinants associated with serious mental disorders such as child abuse (whether through neglect, physical, sexual or psychological abuse, parental loss, bullying by peers, etc.), low levels of education, violence, war, discrimination, substandard housing, etc.