“She’s not the child we had”: How parents reconstruct their child’s identity to include violent and with mental illness

Abstract

This study examines the grief experiences of parents raising children with serious mental illness and violent tendencies (SMI/VT). We conducted in-depth interviews with 32 self-identified parents of young and adult children with SMI/VT. We employed a modified version of grounded theory for the data analysis, which revealed that the grief of parents of children with SMI/VT parallels that of parents whose children have died. To cope with their grief, participants reconstructed their child’s identity in one of two ways: (1) my child is absent (i.e., my child does not exist, this person with SMI/VT is not my child), or (2) my child is present (i.e., my child is here but the SMI/VT is not a part of my child). We frame our findings through the concept of ambiguous loss. Our manuscript concludes with recommendations for practitioners.

Keywords:

• Family violence
• parent abuse
• ambiguous loss
• mental illness

Acknowledgments

This research was partially funded by the Graduate Research and Creative Activity (GRACA) grant, awarded by Graduate Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Graduate Research and Creative Activity (GRACA) grant, awarded by Graduate Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.