Resilience in children of parents with mental illness, alcohol or substance misuse-An integrative review.

Resilience has no single definition, and the included studies measured it in different ways, so the findings are not directly comparable. The review included only 14 studies, with mixed qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method designs, and some had accepted quality. Most studies were from Western cultures, so transferability to other cultural settings is uncertain. Fewer included studies focused on parental substance misuse than on parental mental illness, so the evidence is uneven across parent conditions. One included study interviewed clinicians rather than children, so some descriptions are not child-reported. The review describes resources and associations reported in included studies; it does not prove that any resilience programme works.

This research was funded by Laholm municipality, grant number S2019/166. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders did not have any role in the study design, data collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data.

Do not read this review as proof that active coping or a resilience programme prevents mental health problems. The included studies were heterogeneous, and the review reports what children and families described or measured, not a tested treatment effect.