Offspring of depressed and anxious patients are at very high risk of a mood and/or anxiety disorder themselves. Parental early onset, having 2 affected parents, female gender, and family functioning are important additional markers that can be used in clinical practice to identify those offspring at greatest risk.

Online forums appear to have relevant additional value as a platform for talking about grief and finding support.

Objectives. To systematically describe the characteristics and techniques of prevention programmes for children of parents with mood/anxiety disorders. In addition, recruitment approaches and difficulties were identified and a meta-analysis was conducted to examine the efficacy of these prevention programmes.Methods. Randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of a prevention programme for children (6-25 years) of parents with mood and/or anxiety disorders were included. A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, PsychINFO, and CENTRAL from the earliest record to March 2019. In addition, programme manuals of identified prevention programmes were requested for a content analysis.Results. Twenty-two articles containing eight unique prevention programmes involving 1,325 subjects were identified. Programmes varied in the number and types of techniques, but all provided psychoeducation. Results suggested that recruitment via clinicians was more successful than recruitment via health maintenance organization databases. In a meta-analysis, a significant risk difference was found in favour of prevention programmesThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

No abstract