The May issue of Health and Social Work has a study showing that children of mothers with mental illness have significant behavioral and relational problems. The children of mothers with bipolar disorder, specifically, have the most trouble.
Adult children of mothers with mental illness show problems [U Michigan news release]
liz | 11:31 AM | Uncategorized
Liz Spikol was born in Philadelphia sometime in the 20th century. She started writing about her experience as a person with mental illness in 1999, while employed at Philadelphia Weekly as the paper’s managing editor. Aside from serving as that paper’s web editor, music editor, staff writer, senior editor, executive editor and a host of other random roles that she couldn’t make up her mind about, she has also worked as a Spanish teacher, as a Certified Peer Specialist during Philly’s system-wide transformation and as a communications specialist for a prison reform organization. Currently, she works at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania and writes book reviews for PW. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about medications, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, SAD (and many other acronyms), mad pride, Big Pharma, celebrities, hospitals, stigma and the recovery movement. And other stuff.
Giving change is more instant gratification for ‘having done something good’, it does not address the root cause of their condition.
It is something that I struggle with a lot as well. The decision whether to have children, that is. I’m single right now and nowhere close to having kids but wonder if having them would be a good idea, for the fear of passing onto them deleterious genes which would predispose them to depression. But before that comes the bigger hurdle of coming “out” to the person you’re dating about your mental illness. Maybe you could write on this issue in one of your future posts?
Also : http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/18392#305680
It’s a tough world where persons with a mental illness are considered largely incapable of having offspring who don’t suffer a mental illness. Call me a fool but doesn’t this stem from the widely promoted belief that mental illness is exclusively genetic and consumers are damned to have mentally ill offspring? Whatever happened to both Nature and Nurture? Did I fail to become a professional clog dancer simply because I didn’t have the clog gene? Maybe it had something with my failure to experience the clog dancing scene.
Of course, the notion that genes alone determine outcomes is clearly refuted by studies of identical twins. Yet, the same proposition is a salve to parents who feel responsible for the mental illness experienced by their children. (Paradoxically, shouldn’t the same parents now feel guilty that they passed along the “rotten” genes?) The acceptance by consumers that we are genetically damaged goods and that we can’t be loving, nurturing, effective parents only causes us to think of ourselves as inherently broken.
Liz, trust me on this – a recent study established without question or qualification that people who have successfully reared healthy, happy sugar gliders are destined to have kids with few MH problems. (Source: “The International Journal of Clinical Psychology, Sugar Gliders, and Parenting.” May 2006.)
Interesting article – “Columbia’s Phelan Presents Findings on Genetic Attributions to Stigma,” Chicago Consortium on Stigma Research Bulletin, Fall 2002. pg. 1.
http://www.stigmaresearch.org/publications/bulletin/CCSRnews2.pdf
I’m BP 1. I’ve tried to keep it all together, though sometimes it fell apart…but I married. I have a 21 year old and 17 year old and they are very, very sane. Stats are important, but they aren’t everything. With the help of a sane normie partner, it really helps. My kids are great. My son is on his way to being an animator and my daughter is so grounded. They are my great joy. They have made me mature, made me know what sacrifice really means and so much more.
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