The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental Health Problems: Identifying Causal Pathways and How to Interrupt Them

A parent’s mental health treatment could directly reduce the risk of their child developing the same problems—but researchers still don’t know how big that effect is, or whether it’s truly causal. This project tackles a stubborn gap in mental health science: we know that mental health problems run in families, but we cannot easily tell whether that is due to shared genes, the environment a parent creates, or both. The researcher has already built statistical tools that separate genetic inheritance from environmental influence using data from extended families and twins. Now they will apply those tools to four questions: whether treating a parent’s mental health condition lowers the child’s risk; how genes and environment interact across generations; whether volunteer-based studies distort what we think we know about mental illness; and what happens when you follow the children of twins from birth—a world-first dataset. If successful, this work could give clinicians and policymakers a clearer target. Instead of treating children only after symptoms appear, they might intervene earlier by supporting parents. It could also reveal which genetic and environmental levers actually matter, making prevention efforts more precise. The research is fundamental—it aims to untangle cause from correlation—but that understanding is a prerequisite for designing effective, evidence-based family interventions.