Resilience: Building immunity in psychiatry

The challenges in our personal, professional, financial, and emotional world are on rise, more so in developing countries and people will be longing for mental wellness for achieving complete health in their life. Resilience stands for one's capacity to recover from extremes of trauma and stress. Resilience in a person reflects a dynamic union of factors that encourages positive adaptation despite exposure to adverse life experiences. One needs to have a three-dimensional construct for understanding resilience as a state (what is it and how does one identify it?), a condition (what can be done about it?), and a practice (how does one get there?). Evaluating the level of resilience requires the measurement of internal (personal) and external (environmental) factors, taking into account that family and social environment variables of resilience play very important roles in an individual's resilience. Protection factors seem to be more important in the development of resilience than risk factors. Resilience is a process that lasts a lifetime, with periods of acquisition and maintenance, and reduction and loss for assessment. Overall, currently available data on resilience suggest the presence of a neurobiological substrate, based largely on genetics, which correlates with personality traits, some of which are configured via social learning. The major questions about resilience revolve around properly defining the concept, identifying the factors involved in its development and recognizing whether it is actually possible to immunize mental health against adversities. In the clinical field, it may be possible to identify predisposing factors or risk factors for psychopathologies and to develop new intervention strategies, both preventive and therapeutic, based on the concept of resilience. The preferred environments for application of resilience are health, education, and social policy and the right approach in integrating; it can be developed only with more research and analysis with focus on resilience. Be it patient or family member or caregiver, advocating resilience will empower psychiatrists in India.