Systematic Review and Meta-Synthesis: Coping Strategies of Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults of Parents with a Mental Illness.

To examine and integrate the current state of knowledge regarding qualitative literature on the coping strategies employed by children, adolescents, and young adults of parents with a mental illness. A systematic literature search was conducted in November 2023 in the following databases: APA PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL Ultimate, and Psychology and Behavioral Science Collection. Peer-reviewed studies utilizing a qualitative or mixed-method design were eligible for inclusion. After quality assessment, a total of 14 articles were included. These studies were analyzed following a qualitative research synthesis, and the reported coping instances were extracted and classified into higher-order families of coping, as conceptualized by Skinner and colleagues (Skinner et al., Psychological Bulletin 129:216-269, 2003). Children, adolescents, and young adults of parents with a mental illness predominantly used support seeking and accommodation as coping strategies. This was followed by strategies such as escape, isolation, and self-reliance. A significant finding was the prominence of role reversal as a coping strategy, which did not fit into the existing system of higher-order families of coping. The established categories for classifying coping in normative samples require modification to better reflect the specific experiences of offspring of parents with a mental illness. Consequently, a new model of coping of COPMI (children of parents with a mental illness) is proposed, building on previous models and integrating findings from this review.