Birth order and psychopathology.
BACKGROUND
Ordinal position the child holds within the sibling ranking of a family is related to intellectual functioning, personality, behavior, and development of psychopathology.


OBJECTIVE
To study the association between birth order and development of psychopathology in patients attending psychiatry services in a teaching hospital.


METHODS
Hospital-based cross-sectional study.


METHODS
Retrospective file review of three groups of patients was carried out. Patient-related variables like age of onset, birth order, family type, and family history of mental illness were compared with psychiatry diagnosis (ICD-10) generated.


METHODS
SPSS 13; descriptive statistics and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used.


RESULTS
Mean age of onset of mental illness among the adult general psychiatry patients (group I, n = 527) was found to be 33.01 ± 15.073, while it was 11.68 ± 4.764 among the child cases (group II, n = 47) and 26.74 ± 7.529 among substance abuse cases (group III, n = 110). Among group I patients, commonest diagnosis was depression followed by anxiety and somatoform disorders irrespective of birth order. Dissociative disorders were most prevalent in the first born child (36.7%) among group II patients. Among group III patients, alcohol dependence was maximum diagnosis in all birth orders.


CONCLUSIONS
Depression and alcohol dependence was the commonest diagnosis in adult group irrespective of birth order.
Department of Psychiatry, Dhulikhel Hospital, Kathmandu University Hospital, Dhulikhel, Kavre, Nepal.
Ajay
A
Risal
Schizophrenia Research Foundation, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Hema
H
Tharoor
Birth order; depression; psychopathology