In my circle of friends a few have mental difficulties, two are highly neurotic and one has periods of severe depression, all three have parents who work in the mental health field,
Could having a psychologist/psychiatrist as mom/dad be bad for your mental health?
I think it might be theme in some TV shows and maybe even a movie, but beside anecdotes have there been studies showing a link between the two?
(Full disclosure)
My dad was a sea captain and my mom is a teacher, and I visit a psychoanalyst once a week (who apparently has two successful children)
I have heard this theory before and it does seem to be close to 100% true for all of them I know personally. My uncle is a child psychiatrist. My cousins, his children, didn’t start off all that badly but something went horribly wrong early. The oldest was literally kicked out of every public school in whatever area they lived so often that they had to move to find schools that would continue to take her. That started in elementary school. She is still trying to find herself at 30 years old and may eventually graduate from college but she has been going for 12 years now. The other is just a morbidly obese bitch. Nobody else in the family is fat yet here she is and I swear every ounce is just pent up rage. She has never had a job either and she is in her late twenties. That would have been the end of the line except my aunt and uncle decided to adopt two more young girls a few years ago so the cycle continues.
My father was a child psychologist, working as a university lecturer for most of his career. My mother was a teacher, who started her career as a pre-school teacher, spent some time in special education, and finished her career in teacher education. If this theory is right, I should have finished up a mess – but I don’t think I did.
I would say it sounds possible. IANA psychologist/psychiatrist/therapist, however it seems to me that they are supposed to maintain a certain professional distance from their patients in order to maintain objectivity. I think that’s impossible to maintain that objectivity with your childen.
It’s sort of like trying to cut your own hair. You just end up with a fucked-up head.
Yes, but psychologist parents aren’t supposed to be giving their children therapy: they are just supposed to be bringing them up like non-psychologists do. If the children need therapy, then outside intervention should be sought.
To put the opposing view: their knowledge of psychology, including such things as child development, ought to help them bring p their children. If professional knowledge of psychology is so bad in child-rearing, then it ought to be bad in psychologists’ other interpersonal relationships.
I’m the child of a psychiatrist and a speech pathologist. My brother and I are both “successful” and neither of us are any more messed up than anyone else in our families–we may even be more mentally healthy. We also have no speech problems.
My theory on this is that psychiatrists and psychologist come from somewhat crazy families and go into those fields to try to understand themselves and their families better… My dad’s family is very loving and close, but they are also very neurotic–OCD being the biggest problem. It makes sense that a child born to a somewhat messed up family also would end up somewhat messed up, regardless of parents’ professions.
The only thing I can think of is that someone who’s seen problems in their family, or who feels a bit off themselves, might gravitate to a psychology type major. Then their kids might be more at risl of inheriting . . . something inheritable, or of being exposed to a bad situation first or second-hand. So that the kids’ problems and the career could both be made more likely by the same underlying thing.
And there’s always the Cobbler’s Barefoot Child possibility.
Of course I have no idea if the children of psychologists/psychiatrists are actually any more likely to do anything.
ETA: missed **Little Bird’s **comment by that much.
I have noticed this but I think it’s a combination of confirmation bias and a lot of other things. I think some therapists are drawn to the field because they have seen a family member struggle with mental illness, so their children may be genetically predisposed to it. Also some therapists are just cocky nutcases. My son used to play with a child whose father was a psychologist, and his childrearing theory was apparently to let the child do whatever he wants and to learn without parental involvement. While in theory this isn’t wrong, this 4-year-old was watching really scary horror movies and acted like a bully, and his father apparently thought this was fine.
I’m the child of a psychologist and both my brother and I are successful and mostly normal. He does have tricotilomania but it began when he was about 11 and his best friend killed himself so I’m not sure dad’s profession can be blamed.
That was the theory I was going to propose. There are A LOT of people who go into mental health related careers because of their own personal experiences with mental illness (and as this article I posted talks about, that may not always be a bad thing!). In some cases, that might translate to their kids having a genetic predisposition or environmental factors that increase their risk of mental illness regardless of what the parents actually do for a living.
A good friend of mine has a husband who specializes in abnormal child psychology. So far, her kids are pretty normal. Her husband’s family is a little wacky, his mother is the guilt inducing stereotype of a Jewish mother. Her family has a history of bi-polar and anxiety disorder.
Her kids are only 7 and 9, so we’ve got a ways to go.
I think it is the Confirmation Bias thing, and probably a little bit of “Unintentionally Fucking Up Your Kid Because You Can’t Let Go Of Your Job At Home”.
Kids can go BLAMMO and get up and be fine with it. It is usually only when mommy freaks the fuck out that the kid is traumatized - not by the event, but by mommy’s reaction. So if your parent is spending your entire life trying to psychoanalyze you and force you into certain diagnoses, I’m quite certain it can completely screw with your development.
I came into this thread to say this. The craziest person I know (I think she has borderline personality disorder) is a psychologist.
Fortunately, her daughter turned out more or less normal anyway. However, in cases where the mental illness has a genetic basis, the children of people in the mental health professions might have inherited the mental illness, fostering a stereotype of crazy psychologists’ children.
I think this happened to my father. His mother was a shrink, and she apparently used her kids as guinea pigs for every psychological assessment trick in the book. As a result, he knows how to respond to any psych survey–MMPI, Rorschach, whatever–to get any particular result/diagnosis, and has zero interest in indulging me in my efforts to diagnose his Asperger’s-like emotional countenance.
Also, for what it’s worth, I have struggled with mental illness all my life, as did my (late) brother, and I am currently going to school as a psych major.
It wasn’t quite that bad with me, but I did do more psychological tests than the average child. I don’t think it did me any harm, and probably helped me be more relaxed about doing multiple-choice tests as an adult.
(I think it also means that I’m a very poor subject for psychological experiments, because I’m more likely to see what the experiment is about. Back in first-year university I was used in an experiment, and I worked out pretty quickly that it was about peer pressure: do you change your opinions based on the opinions of others? Because I’d worked out what was going on, and because I’m a bit of a contrarian anyway, my results probably did not help in the experiment.)
We once got a phone call that the grown son of a couple in the ritziest section of our tow nhad killed both his parets and was now playing hide-ad-seek with the police o their multi-acre estate. He was later caught ad sent to the local mental health facility.
The punchline being that both parents were psychiatrists.
Daddy Daddy, three boys from down the street beat me up and took my bike!
“And how does that make you feel?”
Daddy, daddy, my girlfriend dumped me!
“And how does that make you feel?”
Well dad, it makes me feel all stabby when your only response to anything I say is to ask me how I feel. How about we explore that feeling and see where it leads, hmmm?