• Craig Hirte, Nancy Rogers, Helen Jeffreys
• Department for Families and Communities

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28 June 2011The association between adult mental health disorders and child abuse and neglect has been well documented. To date, however, there have been few studies that examine the prevalence of parental mental health disorders in child protection matters, including the types of mental health disorders associated with protective concerns for children. Similarly, little is known about how child protection workers identify parental mental health disorders, what they classify as such, and how this impacts upon their decision-making.

This project was conducted in response to this gap in knowledge. It seeks to identify the numbers of substantiated child abuse and neglect cases in South Australia where parental mental health difficulties have been identified as a significant risk factor. It should be emphasised that the study was designed to capture broad understandings of emotional and/or mental health difficulties rather than focus more specifically and narrowly on clinically diagnosed mental disorders (for example, major depression or schizophrenia). The authors believed that there is probably a larger group of parents who either do not meet clinical (DSM-IV) criteria (e.g. those with ‘borderline traits’), or who have not come to the attention of mental health services, but who still have significant difficulties and problems in parenting. That is, many parents come to the attention of child protection agencies because of child abuse and neglect issues and are later found, or believed to have, a mental health disorder or problem.

In this study, the authors sought to identify cases where parenting difficulties are (perhaps loosely) assessed by child protection workers as constituting a ‘parental mental health problem’ and what criteria child protection workers use to assess these cases as such. We suspected that there would be cases where child protection practitioners assess parents as having a ‘mental health problem’ because parents present with challenging behaviours – a catch-all phrase to describe parents who are difficult and demanding for practitioners. Th authors thought that child protection workers might experience difficulties assessing parenting capacity because they have limited training regarding mental disorders and there has been little research to guide workers in providing services in that context. We were also interested in examining how assessment guided intervention and the outcome of these decisions for children and their families, as well as the dilemmas for practice that parents with a ‘mental health problem’ may present.