Social Issues of Children That Live With Mentally Ill Parents - Article Example

Determining the credibility of the results offered by Mordoch and Hall is difficult because they did use such a small population sample. But what was disturbing to me was that any child should have to have coping strategies – the parents were either ill with bipolar, schizophrenia or even alcoholism. Reading the comments like “Sometimes my mom’s up, sometimes my mom’s down, sometimes she’s normal. I’m always nervous” (1140) are really disturbing. But comments like this in Mordoch and Hall’s study are just a tiny representation of what children have to go through as a result of the government’s initiatives to move to care for the mentally ill in the community rather than in an institution.

The lecture notes show the process of how the government went from providing full care for people diagnosed as having a mental health issue to the now virtually non-existent level of services available. If we combine that with an overworked GP service, the cost and lack of accessibility so many people face with even trying to get some form of help, and the shambles as government decided to try and get most mentally ill patients into some form of work by denying them any financial help and it would seem that the government has totally forgotten that there are more people involved than just those diagnosed with an illness – there are family considerations that should be taken into account as well.

Sawyer has completed an extensive literature review on the topic of mental health practices and the challenges of finding a system that works for everyone. Through a review of published articles she isolated what I think is the most important thing that has been ignored by government to date – “Methods to come under scrutiny here to critique the assumptions behind service evaluation and the way that statistics might blinker our view of the broad social causes of mental illness” (116).

Some of those broader social issues could include the number of children who are going to need treatment themselves as adults because of the coping mechanisms they have had to adapt while living with parents who have mental health issues.