Pathological psychology

In contrast to other forms of family caregiving, becoming the parent or carer of a child with an intellectual disability (ID) implies an ongoing responsibility beyond the attainment of chronological adulthood (Meyers et al., 1985; Todd and Shearn, 1996). At the same time, a discourse of self-determination pervades policy around transition to adult services in ID in England (Valuing People, 2001). In this paper we present a subset of data from a project which aimed to examine how the process of transition from child to adult services in ID is managed.

The article informs that the community health mental health team where the author worked as a community psychiatric nurse (CPN) a few years ago had a referral from a GP for a woman in her thirties with anxiety and depression. When he went to assess this patient, he discovered that she was the daughter of a previous patient of mine--her mother having had chronic schizophrenia. Nina, the new patient, had been offered a wide range of treatments in the past but had never spoken about growing up with a mother who had schizophrenia.

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a group psychosocial intervention for children (aged 12–18) of a parent with mental illness (copmi).