Children don’t miss a thing, especially when it comes to something being up with Mum or Dad. Mental illness doesn’t discriminate. It can strike at any moment in the life span, across all social classes and groupings. When it does, the whole family of the ill person is affected; partners and spouses, sons and daughters, siblings and parents. This is why any mental health practitioner worth their salt will include the whole family in treatment.
For children, a change in Mum or Dad’s behaviour and functioning can be worrying, mystifying, terrifying, or all three. Routines will likely be disrupted and the stress upon both parents can be absorbed by the child. Many families will struggle to find the words to explain what is happening to their children. Some families will not discuss it at all. Some families will feel ashamed.
The best case scenario for children with a mentally ill parent is having another loving parent and extended family members who will care for them during the illness. Telling the child in basic terms about the parent’s illness and the need for them to have treatment in order to get better is generally the best policy. It encourages the child’s resilience and helps them to understand that the illness is not anyone’s fault. Parenting can be a challenge even for the mentally healthy, so it stands to reason that if one is affected by mental illness it can be impossible to look after oneself, let alone one’s children. It is rare for children to be placed in danger by their mentally ill parent, but it can happen if a parent is psychotic and we must never shy away from that.
Sadly for some children, there is no other stable family member to pick up the slack. These children may end up becoming the carers for their ill parents and younger siblings, may not feel comfortable leaving their parent to go to school and may fear the repercussions of telling anyone about the seriousness of their home situation. Very young children who have a sole parent with a mental illness attempting to care for them may be left in front of the TV for most of the day. Their parent’s emotional state is very unpredictable and nurturing processes such as toilet training and language development are neglected.
There are some supports available for children of parents with a mental illness. Most public Mental Health Services employ a “COPMI” worker, usually to provide counselling, education and support to children of the service’s patients. They can also arrange for the children to attend holiday camps with other children in similar situations. There are also some organisations to support young carers, but despite this, the burden on young carers remains largely unseen.
In recent years, some high profile Australians have begun to share their stories of growing up with a mentally ill parent as the silence surrounding mental illness is gradually broken down. The stories of “COPMI” are around if you look for them. Media personality Jessica Rowe has spoken publicly about her mother’s struggle with bipolar disorder and the sadness of her hospitalisations when Jessica and her sisters were children. Jessica Rowe has also spoken publicly about her own experience of perinatal depression when her first child was born.
Australian writer Biff Ward recently published an incredible memoir called In my Mother’s Hands. In its pages are the stories of Biff’s mother’s severe and chronic schizophrenia at a time when treatment options for schizophrenia were primitive and the only treatment centres were stand-alone mental hospitals near the big cities. If you lived in a small town, there was zero treatment and the general policy was to hush it up except to immediate family. Heartbreakingly, Biff’s older sister, baby Alison, was left solely in her mentally ill mother’s care in infancy and drowned in the bath at age four months. The crossing out, re-writing, and more crossing out on baby Alison’s death certificate speaks volumes on the coroner’s struggle to find words to describe this tragic result of maternal mental illness. However, when the next baby was born, Biff’s father was smart enough to call a female relative to come and live with them, supporting Mrs Ward with the baby. This support ensured the second baby’s survival. One can’t help wondering whether the lives of this family might have turned out very differently, had they access to modern psychiatry and mental health support.
