March 2007

While courts often use parents’ psychiatric conditions as a basis for custody decisions, solid research on the actual impact of parental mental illness on children is limited (For an overview of this issue see Jenuwine & Cohler, 1999). Common sense and clinical wisdom converge in suggesting that parental mental health is an important factor in parenting. However, systematic empirical studies of children of even severely mentally ill parents often show that common sense and clinical wisdom can be mistaken. Children are much less affected by their parent’s illness than one would think.

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