Mental health issues are common, and they are accompanied by significant public and economic costs, social inequality, and disability-adjusted life years (Stracke et al., 2019; GBD, 2019). Almost 10 to 20 percent of children and adolescents suffer from mental disorders globally (WHO, 2017,2018, 2019). In Pakistan, alarming rates of adolescent mental health issues, such as anxiety depression, psychosis, etc. have been reported by researchers (Ashraf at al., 2021 Shah et al., 2022).
Parental illness is one of the main early year’s risk factors for socioeconomic disparities in children and adolescent mental health (Straatmann et al., 2018, Office for National Statistics, 2015; Wickham at al., 2016). Offsprings of parents with mental illness are vulnerable to develop greater internalizing and externalizing problems and experience a marginalized position in society due to economic disadvantage, living conditions, lack of social support, experience of social stigma, fewer educational opportunities (Källquist & Salzmann-Erikson, 2019).

Individual differences in genetic make-up may interact with exposure to maladaptive socio-economic and family environments, maladaptive parenting and personal psychological mechanisms, in explaining the transfer of psychopathology to the next generation (Silberg, at l.,2011, WHO, 2022). The present research takes an ecological perspective to unravel the pattern of intergenerational transfer of mental illness by addressing different social, familial and personal risk and protective factors. The project basically aims at early identification of youth at risk of developing mental health problems as result of their parents’ mental illness. The research encourages the involvement of children, young people and their care givers in the development and implementation of health promoting interventions. This project under the theme of Non-Communicable Diseases, Population Health and Genomics directly deals with public mental health and may also relate indirectly to social and economic development of the country.