Experiences of Parents with Psychosis V1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The experiences and service preferences of parents experiencing psychosis: an interpretative phenomenological analysis.
IRAS ID
288806
Contact name
Anja Wittkowski
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Manchester
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 28 days
Research summary
Summary of Research
Being a parent can be hard. It means balancing lots of practical and emotional demands.
Hearing, seeing and believing things that other people don’t can also be difficult to
manage. Over 440,000 adults in the UK have psychosis and more than half are parents.
This means a lot of people who have psychosis are faced with added challenges when it
comes to parenting.Research has shown that parents with Serious Mental Illness (SMI), including psychosis,
are more likely to be lonely and live in poorer places. This can make mental health
problems harder to manage and has been found to negatively impact the care that children receive. Other research highlights that parents with SMI believe that their mental health difficulties can impact their parenting in negative ways, and that they need extra support because many parts of parenting are affected. But features of psychosis, like seeing, hearing and believing things that other people don’t, are distinct from other SMIs, like eating disorders and depression. This makes it hard to know if psychosis affects parenting in the same ways to what previous studies of parents with SMI have found.There is a clear lack of research that looks at how psychosis impacts parenting. We do not yet know exactly how and when psychosis affects parenting, what support parents feel they need, and how parents would like support to be delivered. This qualitative study will interview parents with psychosis for around an hour and ask them about how psychosis makes being a parent difficult and what their experience of service support has been like. This will help us learn how to better support parents with psychosis. Participants will be recruited on a voluntary basis from NHS organisations (Greater Manchester Mental Health and Pennine Care) and third sector services and is funded by The University of Manchester.
Summary of Results
People who hear, see and believe things that other people don’t are faced with added challenges when it comes to parenting. However, not much is known about how parents with psychosis experience parenting and what support is needed. This qualitative study aimed to speak to parents with psychosis to understand their parenting experiences and their experience with services. Five mothers and three fathers with psychosis were interviewed. Their interview data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and three themes were identified. The first theme identified that parenting while experiencing psychosis was hard. Psychosis could distance parents from their children and from accessing support. This seemed to be because (1) parents could feel scared, (2) the support that was offered to parents could often be focused on risk, and (3) parents sometimes felt that they had to hide to avoid being judged. The second theme identified that parents wanted to feel safely connected with their children, families and friends, and they wanted to be supported by services without feeling judged. When parents were connected with their children, they felt safe and distressing experiences of psychosis were relieved. The final theme identified that parents often felt like they were exposed and open to criticism from services, family and society which limited their freedom to parent how they wanted to. To promote better parenting outcomes, we recommend that systemic interventions should target stigma, provide system-wide psychoeducation, and promote person-centred, compassionate, and meaningful connections between parents and the systems they live within.REC name
Wales REC 2
REC reference
21/WA/0010
Date of REC Opinion
9 Feb 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion