Att leva som barn till förälder med psykisk sjukdom

Sammanfattning: The aim of this descriptive review was to elucidate how the literature describes how children of parents with mental illness experience and have knowledge about their parent’s illness. The aim was furthermore to describe how the children’s existence is affected, can be improved and why the children so often are invisible. Search through Medline (through PubMed) database and additional manual search was conducted. In total fourteen articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were reviewed. The chosen method for analysis was qualitative and the results are presented on the basis of different subjects that elucidated the questions at issue. The study shows that children of parents with mental disorder often takes responsibility for the parents disease, a disease that has to be kept a secret and often lead to social isolation for the children. The children often have poor knowledge of the parent’s illness. Due to different obstacles these children are difficult to identify and thereby also difficult to help. The children themselves have clear opinions of what kind of help they want, mainly economic and domestic support, conversational support and information. One of the authors’ conclusions is that new research needs to be done regarding Swedish conditions.