The influence of parental care and overprotection, neuroticism and adult stressful life events on depressive symptoms in the general adult population.

•A total of 401 subjects from the nonclinical general adult population were studied.•We investigated the effect of quality of parenting, neuroticism and life events.•Quality of parenting directly and indirectly predicted depressive symptoms.•Neuroticism mediated the effect of quality of parenting on depressive symptoms.