Study limitations are noted. First, NESARC diagnostic interviews were administered by trained lay interviewers rather than clinicians. This limitation is somewhat mitigated by the AUDADIS-IV’s structured design and good psychometric properties. Second, this is a study of adults providing retrospective reports of adverse experiences, including childhood adversity and adult exposure to 9/11. Self-reports may be unstable over time (Fergusson et al., 2000; Polanczyk et al., 2009), typically underestimating adversity prevalence. Third, while this study used measures of parental history of mental illness similar to those used in many other studies, such measures reflect the participant’s perception of their parents’ history of problems and may be influenced by participants’ own experiences (Kendler, 1991). However, a recent study comparing the prevalence of child’s perception of family alcohol problems to true prevalence supports use of such family history measures (Kendler et al., 2012). Forth, our findings are based on DSM-IV diagnoses of mood, anxiety, personality and substance use disorders and should be replicated using DSM-5 diagnoses. Fifth, the rates reported for disorders in this study could be underestimated due to attrition. However, attrition
