Stressful Life Events and Depression among Adolescent Twin Pairs

Using the twin pairs sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate bivariate Cholesky models for the influence of stressful life events (SLEs) on depressive symptoms. We show that depressive symptoms [image omitted] and dependent SLEs (events influenced by an individual's behavior) are both moderately heritable [image omitted]. We find no evidence for the heritability of independent SLEs. Results from the bivariate Cholesky model suggest that roughly one-half of the correlation between depression and dependent SLEs is due to common genetic factors. Our findings suggest that attempts to characterize the causal effect of SLEs on mental health should limit their list of SLEs to those that are outside of the control of the individual.