Do Parents Suffering from Mental Illness have a Negative Impact on their Child?

Swapan Chaddah
Prof. Dademo
ENG-122
3 October 2021
Do Parents Suffering from Mental Illness have a Negative Impact on their child?
Mental disorders have increased prevalence in many families worldwide, and some of the people affected are parents with dependent children. According to statistics, one-third of men and two-thirds of women have mental illness in the United States; half of this population are parents with children (Oskouie, Zeighami, and Joolaeo-Jolai 33). Mental illness is a wide spectrum of serve disorders that affects one’s thinking and behaviors and their outcomes also varies from one disorder to another. If not adequately managed, it can negatively affect the various aspects of life, including the parents’ capability to take care of their children. Notably, to some extent, the parent’s mental illness tends to affect he children, but not in all cases. Sometimes, children may also be diagnosed with the mental illness themselves. Therefore, parents with mental illness need assistance from family members, medical personnel, and other societal institutions to help care for their children. Parents with mental illnesses can give their children unconditional care and love and not negatively impact the children’s lives thus, it is not automatic that a child whose parent is suffering from mental disorders will have emotional and behavioral disturbances (Kamis 55). Even though Parents with mental illness have higher chances of negatively impacting their children’s welfare, it is not usually the case and it depends with the severity and symptoms of the mental illness.
There are different mental disorders or illnesses, including bipolar disorder, clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression, dementia, and others (Reupert, Maybery, and Kowalenko 8). The manifestation and outcomes of mental illnesses vary based on the level of cognition impairment. Therefore, parents with mental illness might either be able to carry out their parenting responsibilities or be rendered incapable. Children of parents with mental illness are susceptible to several disturbances that are rarely considered and ignored by the health care system since no research defines the perception of children on their parents’ mental disorders. However, Children are often excluded from the treatment plan designed to treat mentally ill parents (Oskouie, Zeighami, and Joolaeo-Jolai 34). Even though that is the case, mentally ill parents would need help and support from health professionals, family members and to help them care for their children.
On the negative impacts, children of parents with mental illness (COPMI) are susceptible to many social, emotional, and psychological disturbances that become stressors that increase the risk of facing mental disorders. There are different pathways that the parent’s mental disorder can be pushed down to their children. These include specificity, where the parents’ diagnosis of a given disorder increases the child’s likeliness of the same disorder. The other is multifocality, where a specific disorder in a parent directly affects the occurrence of multiple conditions in the offspring. The other pathway is equifinality, where two parent...