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Parental Illness Representation of Intellectual Disability and Parental Emotional Distress and Coping

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Abstract

Objectives

While there have been studies exploring the relationships between parental representations of their child’s illness, parental emotional distress and coping, there is lack of research on parents of children with intellectual disability (ID). The present study explores relationships between parental illness representations of their child’s ID, parental emotional distress and coping.

Methods

Ninety-one parents of children with ID completed measures of the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised (IPQ-R), the Brief COPE scale and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). Correlation, regression and mediation analyses were conducted for all variables.

Results

Emotional distress correlated negatively with ‘identity’ (r = − .23) and positively with self-blame and substance abuse (r = .51), ‘consequences’ (r = .34), perception of child’s symptoms as ‘cyclical’ appearing and disappearing (r = .29) and maladaptive coping such as behavioural disengagement (r = .27). Negative illness representations such as consequences and perception of symptoms as ‘cyclical’ uniquely predicted about 9% of parental emotional distress after accounting for self-blame and substance abuse and behavioural disengagement together explaining nearly 30% of the outcome. Lastly, self-blame and substance abuse mediated the relationship between ‘illness coherence’ and ‘emotional distress’ as well as the relationship between ‘consequences’ and ‘emotional distress’.

Conclusions

The study has identified that certain parental coping methods and illness representations that parents have of their child’s ID are associated with parental emotional distress.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MINDS, Singapore, Singapore

    Vimallan Manokara

  2. School of Psychology, University of Waikato, Hamilton, 3240, New Zealand

    Oleg N. Medvedev

  3. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Boon-Ooi Lee

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  1. Vimallan Manokara
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  2. Oleg N. Medvedev
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  3. Boon-Ooi Lee
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Contributions

VM: designed and executed the study, assisted with the data analyses and wrote the paper.

ONM: collaborated in the writing and editing of the final manuscript.

LB-O: collaborated with the design and writing of the study.

All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

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Correspondence to Vimallan Manokara.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study involving humans were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institute of Review Board at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Manokara, V., Medvedev, O.N. & Lee, BO. Parental Illness Representation of Intellectual Disability and Parental Emotional Distress and Coping. Adv Neurodev Disord 4, 284–294 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41252-020-00165-8

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