Examining the association between mentalizing and parental mental health in a sample of caregivers of children with asthma.

Abstract

Background: Caregivers of children with asthma are at higher risk of experiencing mental health difficulties and lower quality of life than caregivers of healthy children. Mentalizing is a psychological construct that defines the ability of understanding one's own and others' states of mind. Poor levels of mentalizing are strongly associated with a wide range of mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety or emotional dysregulation. This crosssectional study is the first to examine the associations between mentalizing and mental health in a sample of caregivers of children with asthma. Method: Caregivers of children (mean age=6.53, SD=3.72, ages 1 to 17) with asthma were recruited from social media support groups and the Asthma UK charity research bulletin. Participants completed self report measures of mentalizing, family functioning, mood and anxiety difficulties. Results: A total of 88 caregivers completed the full survey. Results indicated that poorer mentalizing capacity was significantly associated with poorer family functioning and increased mood and anxiety symptomatology. Poor mentalizing was significantly associated with increased levels of depression, hypomania and anxiety, explaining 16% of variance in depression and 10% of variance in anxiety. Family functioning was not a significant predictor after controlling for the effect of mentalizing. Conclusions: These findings suggest that mentalizing capacity might be a valued new treatment target to improve the mental health of caregivers of children with asthma. The results suggest that mentalizing could complement previously identified factors such as family functioning or asthma symptom severity in understanding caregivers' mental health. Further investigation into the role of mentalizing in the mental health of this population is warranted.

Mediating and moderating links between coparenting, parental mentalization, parents’ anxiety, and children’s behavior problems.

“…For example, among parents of children suffering from asthma, poor PM predicted the parents’ mental health difficulties over and above family functioning and the severity of the illness. This outcome led the authors to conclude that PM can serve as a buffer against caregivers’ psychopathology (Malda Castillo, Browne, & Perez-Algorta, 2020). Easterbrooks and her colleagues (Easterbrooks, Crossman, Caruso, Raskin, & Miranda-Julian, 2017) examined the links between adolescent mothers’ MM and their toddlers’ perceived behavior.…”

Breaking the cycle: Mentalizing moderates and mediates the link between childhood sexual abuse and satisfaction with adult romantic relationships.

“…That moderate to high mentalizing-certainty about mental states mitigates the effect of CSA on relationship satisfaction provides a sufficient goal for intervention. This is cause for optimism, as intervention programs to enhance mentalizing capacity can indeed increase individuals' robust mentalizing (Malda-Castillo et al, 2019), especially among patients with traumatic history (Smits et al, 2022). Professionals working with CSA survivors may thus benefit from using therapeutic interventions enhancing mentalization on self and others (Ensink et al, 2017), both in individual and within couple therapy (MacIntosh, 2013b;MacIntosh et al, 2019).…”

Teacher psychopathology, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion satisfaction during COVID-19: Resilience and risk factors.

“…In the present study, good reliability was found only for the certainty subscale (α = .83; uncertainty subscale, α = .67). Therefore, consistent with a previous study (Malda et al, 2020), only the certainty subscale was used as a measure of an adaptive facet of genuine and effective general mentalizing capacity.…”