In this paper we look at the childhood determinants of resilience in mental health, where we make a distinction between impacts resilience and general, or life, resilience. Impact resilience is measured as the accumulated mental health costs of a standard negative shock, whilst general resilience is the expected loss of all negative shocks, thus allowing for the possibility that some people are more likely to be affected by many shocks than others. Using longitudinal Australian data, we estimate a latent class model and find three almost equally large groups, where the low resilience individuals were about four times more affected by negative shocks as high resilience individuals, with the low resilience individuals also more likely to experience more shocks. We find that both impact and life resilience are strongly related to persistent personality traits: high internal locus of control and low levels of neuroticism. The probability of being highly resilient was positively related to being healthy, male, well-educated, and raised with an employed father and a stay-at-home mother.