Growing in the Shadow of Mental Illness: Quality of Life, Health Status, Social Functioning, and Health Care Utilization Among Adults to Parents With Severe Mental Illness.

The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that resilience, self-efficacy, trauma, or parenting caused the outcomes. Participants were recruited by convenience and snowball sampling, and many were employed, married, and highly educated, so results may not apply to less functioning or more severely affected adults. All measures were self-report, including retrospective childhood trauma and parental bonding, so recall bias is possible. The morbidity and healthcare utilization checklists were researcher-developed and had lower internal consistency, which may have weakened associations. The Sexual Abuse subscale had near-zero variance and was excluded, so this trauma type cannot be assessed. Resilience scores showed ceiling effects, which may have limited power to detect moderation.

Funding came from Sigma Theta Tau International and the President of the State of Israel National Research Grant. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that resilience protects adults who grew up with a parent with severe mental illness from health or social problems. Resilience predicted quality of life, but the interaction with childhood trauma was not significant for morbidity (p = 0.199) or social functioning (p = 0.924).