Birth Order and Psychopathology

CONTEXT: Ordinal position the child holds within the sibling ranking of a family is related to intellectual functioning, personality, behavior, and development of psychopathology. AIM: To study the association between birth order and development of psychopathology in patients attending psychiatry services in a teaching hospital. SETTINGS AND DESIGN: Hospital-based cross-sectional study. MATERIALS AND 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. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: 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.