Both the 2021 Victorian Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System and the 2020 federal Productivity Commission Inquiry Report highlight the impact of a parent’s mental illness on their children, and the need to break the cycle of mental illness in families.
Monash University’s leadership role in addressing the issue over the past 10 years resulted in the establishment of a research group comprising more than 50 researchers from 12 countries, the Prato International Research Collaborative for Change in Parent and Child Mental Health.
Their work was recently highlighted in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, outlining the key principles and recommendations for working with families living with parental mental illness.
Group member Professor Torleif Ruud, from Norway, has previously published research that shows 36% of clients attending adult services have children under 18. These prevalence rates are consistent across many Western countries.
“Mental health services are typically reactive, where their focus is either on managing crises or treating an individual’s mental health challenges,” says Monash Faculty of Education’s Professor Andrea Reupert, the report’s lead author. “While both are obviously important, if this is their only focus, critical opportunities for prevention and early intervention are missed.”
Services missing an opportunity
Monash Rural Health’s Professor Darryl Maybery, a co-author, says mental health services that treat the parent miss a critical opportunity to stop the cycle of mental illness in the community.
“In later life, children whose parents have a mental illness are up to three times more likely to develop their own illness, but nothing is done until they present with their own social or mental health problems.”
The group’s research has resulted in recommendations for practice, organisational, and systems change.
They found that while genetics play an important role in the transmission of mental illness from parents to children, environmental and socioeconomic factors – including parenting competence, the level of parents’ illness disability, and other family and social supports and stressors – will also influence whether, and how, a parent’s illness impacts their children.
A “family” lens can be provided by incorporating parenting into mental illness treatment plans, and identifying parenting status for those entering mental health services.
Mental health and wellbeing facilities need to be family-friendly, and time, training and resources should be provided to clinicians when working with families. All services – across health, education and welfare – play a part in addressing the needs of these families.
Family members need to be engaged
Other core recommendations include that family members, especially children, are engaged in ongoing conversations and decision-making opportunities when the parent is being treated for an illness; their own needs should be identified and addressed.
There’s an ongoing need to develop legislation, collaborative models of practice, training in family models of care, and the need to benchmark and audit services to ensure children and parents are provided with appropriate care, the researchers say.
“Current practice relies on models that only see individuals, particularly in mental health services,” says Professor Maybery. “This must change. Along with treating a parent’s mental health, professionals must be proactive and provide targeted prevention and early intervention initiatives to children and parents living with parental mental illness.”
This article was first published on Monash Lens. Read the original article
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I am an adult child whose mother has co-morbid mental illness. From my teenage years on I have always espoused the sociological impacts of being raised by someone with serious and ongoing mental health issues – this is often a very isolating experience which only increases its impact on children.
I firmly believe that early intervention for children in this position, is vital; I also believe the mainstay of this intervention is education on mental health and illness. I had to piece together what I learned about my mother’s illnesses and the day I heard a professional say that people with mental illness were responsible for their actions, because they were responsible to comply with their treatment plans and medication regimes, was so enlightening for me. All my life, prior to this, I had heard, “it’s not her fault, she can’t help it”. I later went for a job with these professionals and they were talking about the hardship a family went through when the parent with mental illness was hospitalised – hey what? Not so in my family, this was a time of respite for us all. When mental health institutions were deregulated and families voices were lost to medical decisions there were no real alternatives provided and again, things just got a whole lot worse.
My mother also came from an extremely abusive father and her role modelling of parenting was not the greatest. Additionally, she grew up in Scotland with a father who worked on the wharves in the 1940’s. It is time to bring this issue into the light of the 21st century, to teach parenting skills like Whole-Brain Child and to acknowledge the caring roles of children whose parent(s) are mentally ill.
I hear time and again of people whose parents divorced, probably largely to do with one of them having mental illness – the children were most often left with the mother and if she were the one with the illness then things just got a whole lot tougher.
Thank you for bringing this issue to light – it’s been a long time waiting for this acknowledgement.