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“Growing up with Parents with Mental Health Difficulties”

by Ruth Pluznick and Natasha Kis-Sines
Produced by The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 2008 No. 4 www.dulwichcentre.com.au

Ruth Pluznick and Natasha Kis-Sines are members of the narrative social work team at Oolagen Community Services, a publicly-funded children’s mental health centre in Toronto, Canada. They work with young people and families from diverse communities and are deeply committed to principles of social justice. Ruth is also a founding member and faculty of the Narrative Therapy Centre of Toronto.

This paper documents a project with young people who had grown up with a parent with mental health difficulties. The authors discuss how they were able to employ the narrative practice ‘double-listening’ to stories by the young people – listening not only to the challenges that this experience brought, but also asking about the skills, knowledge, and opportunities the young people used to respond to these.

This and the other narrative principles that informed the project – such as co-research and ‘enabling contribution’ are demonstrated by the inclusion of a therapeutic document from work with a young man, and a transcript of a conversation with a young woman and her mother.

INTRODUCTION

Two years ago, we were invited to participate in a project initiated by the Dulwich Centre called ‘Gathering stories about growing up with a parent with mental health difficulties’. The invitation from this project stated:

We aim to gather stories that relate to the experience of children whose parents or caregivers have/had serious mental health difficulties. The project is seeking stories that not only richly acknowledge the difficulties faced, but also the skills and knowledge of children in these situations and the many facets of the relationships between parents and child. We are interested in including examples of the ways in which parents with serious mental health concerns continue to love and cherish their children, and also ways in which other significant figures in children’s lives play important caring roles during times of crises.

We are social workers and also daughters of mothers who experienced mental health difficulties. For both reasons, we were drawn to the possibilities of a ‘second story’ for families like ours. We read through the questions in the project outline and found they offered us a framework for a different kind of enquiry. We began to meet regularly together to share and record our responses to the questions, and found ourselves increasingly drawn into new relationships to our mothers’ mental health difficulties and to our mothers. We also found ourselves remembering the significant people in our lives who had helped us through some of the difficult times. We both agree that we will not forget the power of the telling and re-tellings of these stories. (Some of these stories are included in Dulwich Centre, 2008.)

“New narratives for parents with mental health difficulties”

Ruth Pluznick and Natasha Kis-Sines Context #108, April 2010

Every culture has its own stories about what it means to be a “good parent”.

In Canada, this includes a parent who has the resources to look after children in a consistently nurturing manner, who will put the needs of children before her or his own needs and who has the knowledge and skills to confidently and successfully meet the challenges of parenting (in a variety of different circumstances). The portrayal excludes parents who love their children, but have difficulties of their own that sometimes get in the way of meeting their children’s needs. These parents are often judged harshly in our society and their different experiences of ‘mother’ or ‘father’ are misrepresented, diminished or dismissed. Included in this group are parents with mental health difficulties.

In 2006, the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, Australia, invited narrative practitioners around the world to participate in a project intended to gather stories about families where a parent is experiencing mental health difficulties (Russell et al., 2006).

Specifically, the Dulwich Centre was seeking stories to counter the dominant problem- saturated accounts of lives in these families; in their words, they were looking for stories which ‘re-graded’, not ‘de-graded’ parents.

We work at Oolagen Community Services, a children’s mental health centre in Toronto. Our agency is committed to work with young people and families in ways that promote social justice, and we welcomed the opportunity to join the Dulwich Centre in an effort to present a more hopeful storyline for families where a parent has mental health difficulties. This article documents some of the narrative ideas and practices that guide our work, provides a platform for the voices of these parents and young people and offers a double-storied account of lives and relationships in these families.

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