Overview
- The meta-analysis, published in Psychological Medicine in May 2026, combined 109 studies involving more than 1.5 million people to assess cognitive outcomes in offspring of parents with severe mental illness.
- At the population level, children whose parent had a severe mental illness showed lower performance across multiple domains including general cognition, language, IQ, memory, attention, and problem solving.
- Effects were largest when a parent had schizophrenia, smaller but meaningful for bipolar disorder, and less pronounced for major depression according to the pooled data.
- Study authors and affiliated institutions recommend family-centered mental health services and routine early developmental screening to guide timely educational and therapeutic support for affected families.
- The researchers stress these are population-level associations that do not mean every child of an affected parent will have problems and they caution against stigma while noting the findings likely reflect combined genetic, social, and environmental factors.