Toward the Development of New Strategies to Assess the Needs of Children and Adolescents with Severely Mentally Ill Parents

Abstract

Up to 10% of mothers and 5% of fathers in Europe have mental illness. Family, educational and social lives of children and adolescents with parental with mental illness (CAPRI) are disrupted by deprivation & repeated hospitalization. This is an urgent political & public health concern: The European Union's CAMHEE report recommends better information on CAPRI risks and resilience and to enable interventions to target the highest risk. This is important because although large numbers of children are in the riskset, most remain resilient. Research needs to support delivery of the CAMHEE initiative by understanding who is at risk and how we can target them early before their life trajectories are fatally disrupted.

To do this, we aim to create groundbreaking cross- national datasets providing robust data on CAPRI prevalence & life trajectories needed to plan future services.

But epidemiology alone cannot expose how risk creates effects at the individual level. We need to know which CAPRI to target with potentially expensive, time-consuming specialist services

Powerful neuroscience techniques such as functional near infrared spectroscopy are now available with which we can link epidemiological risk to elucidate effects of exposure within individual infant brain. This unique interdisciplinary approach yokes robust epidemiological evidence to cutting-edge optical imaging that can be undertaken in very young infants.

This allows us to target developments in clinical interventions for CAPRI to those in greatest need and potentially to those most vulnerable with the future aim to identify early biomarkers of abnormality for targeting intervention in CAPRI.

Disclosure of interest

The author declares that he has no competing interest.