The experience of motherhood in women with severe and enduring mental illness (original) (raw)
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Archives of Women's Mental Health, 2008
To identify the concordance in assessments of health and social care needs of pregnant women and mothers with severe mental illness as assessed by patients themselves and their mental healthcare professionals. Thirty-five staff-patient pairs were recruited from inpatient and community services. Staff and patients completed the Camberwell Assessment of Need-Mothers Version. There were significant differences in the total number of needs (p<0.01) and total number of unmet needs (p<0.001) reported by staff and patients themselves. There was moderate or better agreement on the presence of an unmet need in eight of 26 life domains. Agreement was low in several domains relevant to being a mother-notably pregnancy care, safety to child/others, and practical and emotional childcare domains. Unmet needs were particularly common in the areas of daytime activities, sleep, psychological distress and violence and abuse. Staff and pregnant women and mothers with severe mental illness moderately agree about health and social care needs but agree less often on which needs are unmet. This highlights the importance of the views of the mothers themselves, as well as assessments by staff.
Mothers with serious mental illness
New Directions for Mental Health Services, 2000
Mental health services have generally ignored the parenting needs of women with serious mental illness. This chapter identifies the parenting risks and strengths that these women display, as well as the opportunities available to psychologists to play a key role in improving mother and child outcomes.
Archives of Women's Mental Health, 2004
The Marc e e Clinical Audit is an ongoing data collection exercise that gathers socio-demographic and clinical information about mothers and their infants, admitted jointly to specialist units in UK psychiatric hospitals. The maternal and parenting outcomes, in particular of mothers with schizophrenia and mothers who harm themselves and=or their infants, were determined and analysed. The majority of women had a primary diagnosis of either depression (43%) or schizophrenia (21%). Mothers with schizophrenia were three times more likely to experience a poor outcome than non-schizophrenic mothers, were more likely to be separated from their infant at discharge and were perceived, by staff, to be at greater risk of harming their infant. They were, however, shown to be no more likely to cause actual harm to their infant, or themselves, than non-schizophrenic mothers.
Health & Social Care in the Community
Mothers with severe postpartum psychiatric diagnoses are more likely to have children’s social care involvement with their infants, but little is known about the needs or experiences of this group of women. With input from a lived experience advisory group, we carried out secondary analysis of data collected from 278 mother-infant dyads where the mother accessed acute psychiatric care in England or Wales postnatally. We explored the characteristics, needs, and service use experiences of mother-infant dyads with (n = 99) and without (n = 179) children’s social care involvement. We found that mothers with social care involvement were often experiencing wider adversity and inequity across multiple areas of their lives. These mothers were also less satisfied with their mental health care and had more unmet needs after discharge from acute services. We built multivariable logistic regression models to examine factors associated with children’s social care involvement during the acute adm...