Young Women’s Accounts of Caregiving, Family Relationships, and Personal Growth When Mother Has Mental Illness

Abstract

Family members often serve as the primary source of care and support for loved ones living with mental illness. Although existing research has examined the role of parents and well siblings in providing care to adult children with mental illness, relatively little is known about the caregiving experiences of adult children with a parent with a psychiatric disability. Guided by a life course perspective, the present qualitative study examined first-person accounts of 10 young women attending college (ages 18–22) who were raised by a mother living with mental illness (depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia). Participants completed individual semi-structured interviews in which they described their experiences of caregiving, role reversal, and felt obligation towards mother, their ties to father and siblings, and their views of the impact of maternal mental illness on their lives. Overall, young adults’ accounts of their relationship with mother could be characterized as either predominately positive or predominately negative. In general, participants’ accounts of their caregiving experiences, views of felt obligation, and supportiveness of family ties differed depending on their reports of the overall quality of the mother–daughter relationship. Adult daughters described positive impacts of maternal mental illness on their own lives, regardless of their accounts of relationship quality with their mothers.