Fathers, Fatherhood and Mental Illness

Abstract

This book has resulted from what I perceive to be a contradiction: that fatherhood and mental illness cannot be squared. On the one hand, fatherhood, even though it is changing, is invested with power, authority and strength; on the other hand, mental illness is situated right at the opposite end of such a scale. In social perceptions and stereotypes, people diagnosed with mental illness, if anything, are powerless, without authority or strength. The task of fatherhood with mental illness seems just about impossible and this book, to a considerable extent, is about how fathers cope with that task. Before I take the argument further, I would like to review my discussion so far. In what follows I shall comment on three main themes of my analyses: the dominant negativity in fatherhood constructions, the positive stories and the ambivalence in the narratives I collected.