Injuries in the children of parents living with mental illness

If health and social care systems are to rise to the challenge of reducing the prevalence of mental health problems they need to follow holistic and preventative measures, an approach promised in the national health service long term plan in the United Kingdom.1 Holistic measures mean that attention should fall not only on the individual with a diagnosis of mental illness, but also on the family environment and the wider social contexts in which people are born, grow, live, and age.

In a linked study, Nevriana and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.m853) report a large analysis of preventable injuries in children whose parents were living with mental illness.2 This retrospective cohort study used national Swedish longitudinal health and administrative registers to examine associations between all types of maternal and paternal mental illness and risk of injuries from birth to adolescence. The study population was more than 1.5 million offspring born between 1996 and …