to have experienced high-risk environmental exposures associated with parental alcoholism. These high-risk exposures, by interacting with genetic risk factors for other psychiatric disorders, will have increased the person’s risks of other psychopathology. In such instances where comorbid disorders do not directly influence the risk of alcohol dependence, the association between alcohol dependence and the comorbid psychiatric disorders (e.g., depression) would arise from intergenerational processes rather than from intrapersonal processes (also see the figure).
