A Resilience Framework for Research, Policy, and Practice

It was a search for understanding the nature and origins of schizophrenia that brought Norman Garmezy to the study of children at risk for psychopathology, a pursuit that eventually led to the Project Competence studies of competence, adversity, and resilience (Garmezy, 1973). During the 1940s and 1950s, Garmezy developed an interest in the significance of competence in the history and prognosis of patients with serious mental disorders, with a particular focus on premorbid functioning in patients with schizophrenia (Garmezy & Rodnick, 1959). Eventually, the search for antecedents of psychopathology led Garmezy and others to study children of mentally ill parents because of their elevated risk of developing…