Title: Psychosocial resilience in adolescent offspring of mothers with depression: testing causal mechanisms
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Adolescent emotional and behavioural problems have become increasingly common. A key priority is to identify causal risk and protective mechanisms to inform policies and prevention strategies, especially in high-risk groups. A common contributory factor is exposure to maternal depression that can have a major impact on the development, health and wellbeing of children, especially when a mother's depression is chronic or recurrent. Problems often develop during adolescence and include depression, antisocial behaviour and difficulties at home and at school. However, maternal depression affects children in different ways. Many young people with a depressed mother do not develop behavioural or emotional problems and instead remain well-adjusted. This study tests the role that young people themselves, their families and friends play in promoting resilient adaptation to maternal depression as a risk influence. Is resilience more likely when a parent's depression does not interfere with effective parenting or when harmonious family relationships are maintained? Are children's own resources important, for example having effective coping strategies? Can positive relationships with friends compensate for difficulties at home? Understanding what best helps young people with depressed parents maintain positive psychosocial wellbeing as they grow up is important as this will facilitate identification of effective intervention targets. However, it is crucial to show that resilience promoting factors are associated with sustained protective effects, to consider whether they also predict change in well-being (e.g. recovery from earlier problems), to test the direction of effects thereby clarifying 'causal' mechanisms involved in resilience. To find out the causal pathways involved requires good understanding of how resilience in young people develops over time. This project makes use of two extremely valuable longitudinal datasets and analyses. The first is a large population cohort of parents and children studied from birth into adolescence. The second is a sample of parents with recurrent clinical depression. Both studies have followed parents and their children as they grow older. This means that analyses can begin to disentangle underlying causal processes by modelling how change in young people's mental health is related to change in the factors that promote resilience (and vice versa). The study will also address a number of other important issues. We will make sure that child, family and peer relationship factors that might form the targets for intervention are not just markers for correlated adversity. We will test which protective factors are specifically important in the context of maternal depression. The study will address whether different factors are important for boys and for girls, because this will later help tailor interventions appropriately. Finally, we will test whether explanations for resilience in young people affected by chronic maternal depressive symptoms in the general population are the same as for a sample of adolescents with more severely affected mothers with recurrent depressive disorder.


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH