Sharing – Happy childhood? That’s no guarantee for good mental health

This study out of Australia confirms something I’ve written about many times in regards to things like the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study:

While the study reaffirmed that people who had adverse and unpredictable early life experiences had elevated symptoms of poor mental health (including depression and paranoia), it also found that children who grew up in stable and supportive environments were also at risk of experiencing symptoms of anxiety in adulthood.

Having a traumatic childhood can be the cause of some mental health concerns. I can, for example, draw a fairly straight line between my experiences and the struggles with depression I had later in life. But, I also know plenty of people with mental health struggles who didn’t have a very traumatic childhood, and I know plenty of people who had traumatic childhoods who didn’t end up with depression. There’s no one answer here, there are multiple possibilities and multiple ways that people react to those possibilities. If it were easy to just know who will get various mental health issues, and how each person would respond to treatment, we could have fixed all of this by now. Since it’s not that simple, it will require a lot of effort, and resources that we just don’t seem willing to put into it. That’s a shame.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/uosa-hct_1020321.php