”Att skaffa barn som psykisk sjuk är det mest själviska man kan göra.”- en kvalitativ undersökning av att växa upp med psykisk sjuka föräldrar

Sammanfattning: Author: Choban, Azal and Roos, Marie-Christine Title: ”Att skaffa barn som psykisk sjuk är det mest själviska man kan göra.”- en kvalitativ undersökning av att växa upp med psykisk sjuka föräldrar Supervisor: Arne Kristiansen Assessor: Anders Östnäs The aim of our essay was to study how children of parents with mental illness grow up and how this affects them in later life. We also wanted to see to their risk and protective factors and how these could be a support for them. Finally we locked at their supportive system from school and other authorities.We used qualitative method with semi structured interviews to reach our results. We had an interview guide for help and recorded our interviews. We interviewed 8 adults between 23 and 63 years about their childhood memories. We discovered that even if there were many similarities some things were different such as what kind of help they got and how they dealt with their parents illnesses. The result of our study is that sudden risk and protective factors are important for the child’s wellbeing and its development such as other people in its environment who have a big influence on the child’s outcome. They didn’t get the support they needed authorities because nobody really new how bad they got it at home and if they got help it often resulted in worse conditions at home because of the handling of the madder. All of them had some kind of affect from their childhood such as depression and social problems. We discovered that there still is much room for improvement in how to handle children of parents with mental illness and that we have to listen to their story instead of ignoring them.