Influences of maternal mental illness on psychological outcomes for adolescent children DAPHNA OYSERMAN,DEBORAH BYBEE AND CAROL MOWBRAY The research literature associating maternal mental illness with problematic mental health outcomes of adolescent children typically controls for neither the effects of family stresses and lack of support, nor the effects of parenting style. To address this gap, we explore the effects of maternal psychiatric symptoms and community functioning on child outcomes in a diverse sample of seriously mentally ill women caring for their teenaged children. In hierarchical multiple regression, for youth depression, we find effects for parenting style and maternal mental health; for youth anxiety and efficacy, effects involve the interplay between maternal symptoms and community functioning. r 2002 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In the current study, we focus on effects of maternal mental illness on an adolescent’s psychological well-being. That maternal mental illness is negatively associated with mental health outcomes of children (though not specifically adolescents) is amply evidenced in recent studies (e.g. for maternal depression: Hammen et al. (1987 a,b) for bipolar disorder, Duffy et al. (1998); Grigoroiu-Serbanescu et al. (1991); for schizophrenia, Arbelle et al. (1997) and reviews (e.g. Beardslee et al., 1998). These studies typically find that maternal mental illness is associated with child mental health problems (for a review focused on maternal depression see Downey and Coyne (1990); for a meta-analysis focused on bipolar disorder see Lapalme et al. (1997). Moreover, the literature on biological transmission of disorders indicates genetic vulnerability for children of parents with a serious mental illness, with strength of genetic vulnerability varyingFbeing lower for depression and higher for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (Beardslee et al., 1998). However, outcomes for children of parents with even severe mental illness are heterogeneous, and ways that parental psychopathology may influence outcomes for their children is far from clear (see Beardslee et al. (1998) for a review). Unfortunately, most recent research on children of parents with severe mental illness has studied the relationship between parental diagnosis and child diagnosis without taking family stresses, contextual issues (see for example Chang et al., 2000) or parenting into account (for a review, see Oyserman et al., 2000), especially in research on adolescents. Thus, even though the literature has clearly documented increased risk for children of mothers with a mental illness, more research is needed to understand the process by which risk is conferred. First, as noted in meta-analyses of effects of having a bipolar parent (Laplame et al., 1997), research lacks sufficient focus on the adverse social and contextual factors associated with maternal mental illness and has not disentangled the effects of maternal symptoms and functioning from the effects of problematic parenting and other Reprint requests and correspondence should be addressed to: Dr Daphna Oyserman, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1248, U.S.A. (E-mail: daphna@umich.edu). 0140-1971/02/$35Á00/0 # 2002 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Adolescence 2002, 25, 587–602 doi:10.1006/jado.2002.0506, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on