‘She wants to hit me, but I love my mother’: Subjective experiences of children living with parental mental illness

Abstract

Drawing on findings from a larger project with children whose parents have mental illness in Ghana, involving 30 interviews and 19 diaries completed, we provide a snapshot into the maltreatment experience of these children. Epidemiological studies have found that these children may develop mental health issues and ample evidence has been reported on their poor social and behavioural outcomes. However, the children’s voices and experiences of their own living situation has been limited. Notwithstanding, services have not always met their needs. Their needs and problems are often unnoticed and ‘invisible’. In this article, we focus on information from their diaries. Overall, the article reports specific events in the children’s lives that represent physical, verbal, and emotional abuse. The children also understand that their life contains good and bad days, representing the unpredictability of mental illness. We conclude that services should be preventative to address the impact of parental mental illness on children. This could be achieved through inter-agency collaboration, where mental health and child welfare services work together. The starting point for any professionals who work with the child or the family, to collect information and assess the parental roles and functions and what it means for the child. before a more formal platform for inter-agency work is established for the different disciplines (i.e., medical doctor, medical social worker, family worker and child welfare officers).