Growing up after terrorism: parental psychopathology and adult offspring PTSD and emotional disorders: a long-term study in a Spanish sample

Abstract

The present study investigates whether parental psychopathology developed after a terrorist attack influences the development of disorders in their children in the very long term, with a mean time of 24.87 years (SD = 8.5) having elapsed between the event and the assessment. For this purpose, participants included 66 adults (Mage = 32.17, SD = 7.25; 59.1% female) who were minors at the time of the attack (Mage = 5.92, SD = 4.98) and 67 parents (Mage = 58.82, SD = 7.86; 62.7% female). We examined a possible relationship between the development of parents’ psychopathology after suffering the attack and the psychopathology of their adult offspring, whose exposure—direct or indirect—occurred during childhood. The analysis focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and emotional disorders (depressive and anxiety disorders). No statistically significant evidence was found to support the relationship between parental and offspring psychopathology, with measures of the effect size of OR = 1.79 for PTSD, OR = 2.22 for depressive disorders, and OR = .81 for anxiety disorders. Although the data show some tendency suggesting that offspring of parents with past psychopathology may be more likely to develop depressive disorders and PTSD over the long term, no statistically significant results were found to support the research hypothesis or much of the existing literature. Therefore, these findings should be interpreted cautiously due to the lack of significant evidence.