ABSTRACT
The nature of psychiatric disorder and its impact on parental and family functioning are complex areas for non-mental health practitioners, who may have particular difficulty defining their concerns about a child’s welfare. Often, child care professionals have been worried over a period of time but, because the parent’s functioning varies, they remain unsure whether there is substantive evidence of significant harm. Their continuing uncertainty means that the threshold for taking child protective measures may not be reached until late in the day. Indeed, mental health professionals can themselves have conflicting ways of understanding the issues involved and this widened professional network increases the potential for differences of opinion or miscommunications. Sometimes, the parent will be known to adult psychiatric services but, in other instances, their mental state has never been examined. Concern about the parent’s mental health can become such a focus of attention that it dominates all other issues. A feature of a significant number of such cases is that the parent expresses genuine concern for the welfare of their child: the problem is that they find themself unable to act in ways that consistently satisfy the child’s needs.
