Parental Psychiatric Symptoms and Children's Outcomes: Toward Understanding and Responding to Intergenerational Risk in Child Psychiatry.

Family history of psychiatric illness is a core feature of any competent clinical history taken in a child and adolescent psychiatry clinical setting, and this history is often limited to reviewing caregivers' reports of diagnosed or suspected mental disorders in biological parents and relatives across several generations. Less commonly included is a detailed inquiry into parents' and caregivers' current mental health, including psychiatric symptoms at the time that their child is presenting for evaluation. Recent evidence is a strong reminder that parental mental illness is an important adversity that critically affects lifelong mental well-being in offspring, and that maternal depression in particular is an established factor influencing offspring mental health.1-3 In this issue of the Journal, Wesseldijk et al. present their article "Do Parental Psychiatric Symptoms Predict Outcome in Children With Psychiatric Disorders? A Naturalistic Clinical Study," an effort to examine relationships between parental psychiatric symptoms and clinical outcomes in child psychiatric patients.4 The study moves beyond a focus on maternal depression as a risk factor for offspring psychopathology to include a range of active psychiatric symptomatology in both mothers and fathers at the time that children are presenting for clinical evaluation, and again at follow-up over a year and a half later.