Supporting Families With Parental Mental Illness - A Community Education and Development Manual
Supporting Families With Parental Mental Illness:
A Community Education and Development Workshop Manual
What is the “Support Families With Parental Mental Illness” Manual?
The manual “Supporting Families With Parental Mental Illness” contains all the information needed to hold a successful workshop that will inform audiences as to the issues involved in supporting families with parental mental illness. The manual supports four functions
1. To educate the community in understanding mental illness and its effects on parenting and child development.
2. To assist communities in critically assessing existing services.
3. To bring service providers together in an effort to encourage collaboration in working with families where there is parental mental illness.
4. To help communities answer the question: “What are we as a community doing to support families with parental mental illness?”
This manual is not a guide on interventions that can be used in working with families. Instead it provides an opportunity to see the broader picture, to envision the community where families reside and the services they can possibly access.
How Did This Manual Come To Be?
Parents who have serious and persistent mental illness are often not provided with the necessary services and support that will assist them in caring for their children. In 1998, a small group of people gathered who were interested in the needs of children growing up with parents who had a mental illness. This group, the Supporting Families with Parental Mental Illness Provincial Working Group, held two forums to discuss what worked and what did not work for families where there is parental mental illlness. As a result of these forums,the provincial working group developed the vision of a “Best Practices Document”, a guide for any community in the province wanting to consider the needs of these families. The plan was to develop a community education guidebook, alone with steps needed to hold a community workshop.
This manual is the result of a group of people, most of whom have worked “off the corner of their desks” on this project. The Provincial Working Group gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Ministry for Children and Family Development, and Mental Health and Addictions Policy Division that assisted the group in developing this manual.
We welcome comments and feedback on the manual. We’d also love to hear how your workshop went.
The manual is in PDF format and requires a PDF reader. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader Version 5.0 or the most recent version of another PDF reader, you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader here for free.
Download Manual here