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Aims/Objectives: Resilience research in child and adolescent psychopathology is limited.
This paper aims to explore factors that promote resilience, drawing-out pointers for clinical
practice and research amongst child and adolescents with psychopathology in India.
Method: A narrative review; studies for this paper were drawn from published and
unpublished research, carried out at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro
Sciences, India. Studies were chosen if at least one variable of assessment was resilience.
Findings across studies were synthesized to elucidate common resilience promoting factors
for children and adolescents in difficult circumstances.
Results: Only 4 studies were available. The age range of participants across these studies was
from 5 to 16 years, having adversities of impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds and
diagnoses of emotional/behavioral disorders. The Structured Scenario with Questions-
Adapted was the tool used to assess resilience. Findings suggested a positive association
between resilience promoting factors and mental wellbeing. Children were noted to make
greater use of resilience promoting factors than adolescents. There were no gender
differences. Participants with emotional/behavioral disorders had fewer resilience promoting
factors than those from impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds. Resilience promoting
factors were noted to lie within the child/adolescent (skills/inherent strengths) and external
world (social supports).
Conclusion: Psychopathology and resilience are not mutually exclusive. It is pertinent to
examine resilience promoting factors for a given child/adolescent, albeit psychopathology,
towards ensuring optimal mental health outcomes. Greater research is required in this
domain, towards facilitating accurate understanding and effective interventions.