**Author details**

*Quality of Life - Biopsychosocial Perspectives*

**4.5 Clinical implications**

HR offspring's self-esteem levels. This further indicates that age has an impact on the vulnerability of HR offspring, in which developmental literature can address in future research, by conducting more longitudinal studies to map the trajectory of this vulnerability and make comparisons between different age groups (i.e. less than 10 years old and greater than 10 years old). Moreover, parental physical illness was incorporated by eliminating HR offspring of those that were suffering from chronic physical illnesses [64], to minimise the effect of this stressor. This is because this may cause greater significant stress on the HR offspring, which may impact the psychological difficulties the HR offspring may encounter. Therefore, to minimise bias amongst the findings, these particular HR offspring were excluded from the study. Considering living arrangements amongst HR offspring, the HR perspective was explored amongst those adopted offspring living away from the biological parent suffering from schizophrenia [66]. Findings revealed that HR offspring still displayed a greater prevalence of psychopathology in comparison to the HC group. This finding highlights upon a predominant genetic vulnerability amongst HR offspring, despite being reared away from their biological parent with schizophrenia. This builds upon previous literature [36–42] highlighting upon the idea that brain abnormalities are genetically transmitted to HR offspring, thus supporting a diathesis-stress explanation.

The findings build upon the idea that parental schizophrenia negatively impacts the psychosocial well-being of HR offspring regarding the following aspects: the prevalence of emotional and behavioural symptoms, internalising and externalising behaviours, psychiatric conditions, lowered quality of life, poorer self-concept, social adjustment, social functioning and employment situation. The greatest impact across studies in this review was the impairments in social functioning, which can be interpreted using the diathesis-stress explanation. The genetic vulnerabilities appeared to have been transmitted from parent to offspring, whereby environmental factors and stressors surrounding these individuals triggered an onset of these impairments. This review provides a more current set of findings with the inclusion of social impacts as well as psychological impacts, in comparison to the previous systematic review based

solely upon the development of psychiatric conditions of HR offspring [11]. The current findings can aid public health authorities in raising awareness for this HR population by means of prioritising education in mental health, mass media and by increasing public funding. Revelations can also encourage early visits to mental health centres for screenings and evaluations to prevent and provide support [12]. It can also inform clinicians about targeted intervention strategies for HR offspring, such as taking into consideration the developmental differences in the onset of psychosocial distress. All these aspects can either prevent the later

Overall, the implications for having a parent with schizophrenia have a negative

impact on the psychosocial well-being of offspring. There are also implications concerning the development of psychiatric conditions including schizophrenia amongst HR offspring. Future research will be able to develop upon ideas and notions gathered, regarding the extent to which parental schizophrenia impacts the psychosocial well-being of offspring. This review highlights upon the demands and needs of HR offspring, which requires greater awareness to be made, allowing not

emergence of psychosocial difficulties or reduce experienced.

only the parent to receive support but also the HR offspring.

**176**

**5. Conclusions**

Sabreena Hussain Queen Mary University, United Kingdom

\*Address all correspondence to: sabreenahussain07@hotmail.co.uk

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
