Mental disorders and conditions of life in childhood in Greenlanders

A cohort of Greenlandic psychiatric patients, domiciled in Greenland and admitted for the first time to a psychiatric institution in 1980-84, has been analyzed and followed until 1991. In this part of the study their conditions in childhood were analyzed in relation to diagnoses. Failing care, disharmony and possible violence in the early home were associated with great risk of later personality disorders, whereas they were not associated with a neurotic development. No direct association was found with the structure of the early home, whether or not spending the whole childhood with both or one of the biological parents. It was the quality of the home(s) that mattered. For other diagnoses there was no clear association between conditions in childhood and occurrence of the diagnosis. But there was an astonishingly high prevalence of poor conditions in childhood in the total study population, especially among those younger than 35 years at first admission.