When Your Patient Has Children: How the Clinician Can Support Good Parenting

Abstract

Most of our patients have children. All clinicians need to know how best to support good parenting in their patients. A parent with mental illness can benefit from understanding how to talk with their children about mental illness. This chapter describes parenting and mental illness from four perspectives: the child, the parent, the child psychiatrist, and the adult psychiatrist. Children of parents with mental illness, when asked, can clearly state what they would like from the mental health system. Parents want to avoid drawing attention to their family as they are fearful of being judged negatively. Child psychiatrists have developed family-based interventions that can prevent psychiatric symptoms and illness in children. Adult psychiatrists need to encourage and support their patients in discussing mental illness as a family, and to consider the development of care plans, should the parent become ill. All clinicians should be able to provide age-appropriate family interventions to competently involve children in the office and hospital setting.