CHILDREN with mentally ill parents in Australia are doing it tough. These children are often wise beyond their years, juggle school and housework and care for younger siblings. They have very little time for friends or sport and, all too often, they dispense medication and manage household budgets, anecdotal research has revealed.
Unlike attitudes to physiological illnesses such as cancer, the wider community does not often acknowledge that the effects of mental illness extend beyond the individual. National Mental Health Week and World Mental Health Day today are aimed at lifting the stigma on mental illness and encouraging the public to support those diagnosed.
However, the capacity of mental illness, to change the lives of the entire family is often overlooked. Rarely officially recognised as carers, children with a mentally ill parent are offered little assistance because service providers have no way of knowing the extent of the problem.
It is not known how many children in Australia help care for a mentally ill parent because, to date, the situation has not been monitored.
Mental Health Council of Australia carers' engagement project officer Linda Rosie says the number of young mental health carers is estimated to be in the millions. ''If you take the fact that one in every five Australians suffers from a mental illness at some point in their lives and then look at how many people there usually are in any one family … we're looking at a lot of young carers,'' she says.
The council last year held more than 100 mental health carer engagement workshops around Australia, in which it was revealed children take on extraordinary responsibilities without external support.
The information from the 1500 participating carers -young and old - has been used to compile the Adversity to Advocacy report, which will be presented to Parliament this month.
While there are some state-based non-government organisations that support and give respite to young carers, the workshops have highlighted gaps in helping children with a mentally ill parent, and mental health carers generally.
A national charity is also seeking to better inform children and young adults about mental illness and provide them with coping mechanisms focused on keeping families together. The Children of Mentally Ill Consumers Australia Foundation has developed information kits for children to use in an emergency or if a parent is hospitalised. A key part of the kit aims to better inform teachers about mental illness, to prevent young carers from being inaccurately labelled as ''slow'' or ''naughty''.
''Teachers just don't seem to understand the issues young carers face,'' Rosie says. ''It might have been chaos at home the night before, and in between cooking dinner, comforting Mum or Dad and getting their younger siblings off to bed they haven't had time to do their homework.''
COMIC chairman Clive Skene says the organisation aims to assist children who care for a mentally ill parent on any scale.
''If one person in the family has got a problem, everyone has got a problem,'' he says. ''Children are very good barometers of their family, so if there are problems in the family they will often manifest in the child.''
While some children may be fortunate enough to have a second parent acting as the primary carer, children as young as eight - particularly in single-parent families - are reportedly running households and providing emotional support to their mentally ill parent, according to COMIC.
''Most children are pretty resilient and they learn how to cope, to adjust, compensate and care, but that's putting an awful lot of pressure on the young person and creates additional risk factors for that young person,'' Skene says.
While it is no real secret what needs to be done to help mentally ill people and their loved ones, psychologists should be including the whole family in the development of care plans, he says. ''I really can't see any other effective way of working.''
AAP
