Helping kids whose parents have mental illness
More than 12 per cent of children in Canada live with a parent who has one or more mental health disorders.
Other studies suggest one in two children with a parent with a serious mental illness are at risk of developing mental health issues of their own.
A $50,000 innovation research grant awarded to Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare hopes to identify these children and ways to help them. It’s the first research of its kind in Windsor-Essex and one of the few research projects in Canada for these children under age 12 who fall through the cracks, Jennifer Voth, a Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare research associate and the research project’s lead, said Tuesday. “We really don’t know the magnitude of the problem in WindsorEssex,” Voth said. Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare is the lead agency for Child and Youth Mental Health for WindsorEssex and received the $50,000 innovation grant from the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health.
The project started in April and will run until March 2019. The hospital is working with the Regional Children’s Centre, the WindsorEssex County Health Unit through its Healthy Schools program, and the Windsor-Essex Children’s Aid Society to learn how many children locally might have a parent with mental health issues and come up with an early intervention strategy that could be a model for other communities. Currently there are no specific programs for these children or ways to identify them, she said. “It is quite new. This is kind of seen as a hard to reach group,” Voth said.
The research will look at what is being done in other countries and speak with youth, parents, adults who grew up living with a parent with a mental illness, and local agencies.
Voth said the children are likely struggling at a young age to understand what’s going on with their parent. Research says the children may be caregivers to siblings or their parents, she said. They may have the fear of being stigmatized, they may be acting out or dropping out of school and they may not know how or where to ask for help. “Man oh man this is understudied,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what it would be like as a child to potentially not understand what my parent is going through and how do I manage that.” Voth, who is one of three people in the hospital’s research department, said people who receive support earlier in life have better outcomes.
“Service is often recovery-oriented. It’s really focused on what can we do to support that parent with a mental health issue as opposed to looking specifically at what would their kids also need.”