“My Dad Got Depression, or Something”: How Do Children Talk about Parental Mental Disorder?

Abstract

The research about children affected by parents with mental disorders has suggested that information and an understanding of the parent's problems are important factors in the child's resilience. Therefore, increasing the child's understanding has been defined as a key element in many preventive interventions. However, there is little research about children's conceptions of parental mental disorder. The article examines the discourses (vocabularies) that children use as their resources when talking about a parent's mental disorder during a qualitative research interview. It pays special attention to the interviewer-child interaction. The data come from interviews with ten Finnish children. The results show that the children employ three vocabularies in the interview: the professional, the empirical, and the vocabulary of concern. The results illustrate the importance of looking at the nuances of adult-child interaction. They also question the self-evident use of a medical discourse in giving information about the parental problems.

Can I Tell Just by Myself? Discussing a Parental Mental Disorder With a Child in a Research Interview

“…The findings of our previous interview study with children were the starting point of this article (Alasuutari & Järvi, 2012). In the previous study, all the interviewees described their parental mental disorder as something that they want to conceal, and have concealed, from their peers.…”

“…She also presents hiding the problem as her way to avoid shame and embarrassment, and consequently, to construct a nondeviant identity among her peers. This was also what the other interviewees explained as their way of dealing with their peers and managing associative stigma (Alasuutari & Järvi, 2012).…”

“…Tanja's interview is representative in this sense. She produces lengthy narratives on several topics, and the interview shows her ways of deploying all three of the discourse types (professional and empirical discourses and the discourse of concern) that we analyzed in our previous study (Alasuutari & Järvi, 2012). Moreover, the interview also aptly illuminates different aspects of adult-child interaction in a research interview, and when discussing parental problems.…”

“…This article draws on a single research interview from the data gathered in our previous study (Alasuutari & Järvi, 2012 ); that is, qualitative interviews with ten children, 8 to 12 years old. The children had attended a peer-group intervention for families with a parental mental disorder.…”

“…In our previous study, we interviewed children 8 to 12 years old who had a parent with a mental health problem (Alasuutari & Järvi, 2012). As in a growing number of qualitative studies (e.g., Riebschleger, 2004;Aldridge, 2006;Mordoch & Hall, 2008;Östman, 2008;Backer, 2011;Oskouie, Zeighami, & Joolaee, 2011), our focus was on children's views of their parent's problem.…”