A Parent's Experience of Receiving a Mental Illness Diagnosis for His Young Child: How Perceptions of Mental Health Change

Young children (under age 10) are diagnosed with and treated for mental illness (MI) with increasing frequency. A child's receiving a MI diagnosis shapes a parent's perceptions of mental health for the rest of their lives yet there are few qualitative studies of parents' experiences. This study's goal was to gain greater understanding of how a child's diagnosis with MI affects that parent's perception of mental health and illness. Denzin's interpretive interactionism guided the qualitative case study design. Two 90-minute interviews were conducted with one parent in which the interviewer asked the following questions: “What was it like to hear that your child has a mental illness?”; “What does this experience make you think about mental health and illness?”; and “How does this experience change your perception of mental health?” Five themes emerged: alienation from peers; educational staff's stigmatization of MI and their conflict with mental health care providers; shifting perspectives on MI; cobbling together social support and a coherent picture of MI; and networking with mental health care specialists and new peers. A parent's perceptions of mental health and illness are influenced by peers, by educational and mental health care systems, and by current paradigms of mental illness as neurochemical imbalance. Future research should explore providers' and lay perceptions and knowledge of epigenetics, early life origins of MI, and capacities for mental health promotion and disease prevention to inform interventions aimed at prevention and increasing quality of life.