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'Troubles Talk' among professionals working with families facing parental mental illness
Ioanna Bibou-Nakou
Department of Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstract
The material presented is based on a pilot European project (DAPHNE PROJECT 2001/ EU funding, collaboration between Greece and England) regarding parental mental illness and their children's welfare and needs.
The aim of this paper was to seek the responses and the reflections of 18 practitioners working for different agencies in relation to collaboration issues with children and parents with mental illness.
Specifically, the participants were asked to discuss issues that they themselves as professionals would find either difficult or easy to tackle when working with both children and adults in the cases of parental mental illness. The dominant themes emerging from the participants' responses concern (a) the children's level of understanding and their need for information, and (b) the balances between parental mental illness and parenting capacity.
Results are discussed in order to improve the services received by families where one parent has a mental illness and where there are also children.
Keywords
parents with mental illness and their children, professional perspectives, family models
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