The Parental Role and Bipolar Disorder

As a parent you learn to put your children’s needs before your own. Isn’t that the nature of the parental role, making certain children are safe and secure? But, what happens if the parent is ill? What occurs when a parent is bipolar and cannot deal adequately with a minor child’s need for guidance, for structure, for nurturing?

Illness typically has the focus of concern for the ill person. When you have a cold or the flu, your attention shifts from those outside yourself to you. You don’t feel well; you want to be taken care of. Yet, to be a parent is to shift the focus from you to your family.

When you’re mentally ill, it is all too easy to have your view be surrounded by your symptoms. This runs counter to taking responsibility for the care of those more vulnerable than you. Often you, the parent, are vulnerable, lacking common sense and the wisdom it takes to guide your children. All too often, the children become the parent. They take on at a young age the role of safety monitor for other siblings and may even assume the care of the ill parent. This is called a parentified child; a child who is caught between love for their parent and the too early assumption of adult roles, thereby cutting childhood short.

Even in families where there is a healthy parent attempting to deal adequately with child and spouse, there is an inability to connect with the partner to share the burden of responsibility. Families such as this often run afoul of an overtaxed partner living on the edge of a breakdown himself/herself. Caregiver burnout is often the result. It is at times like this that children fall through the cracks, into that dark world of negligence, unmet needs, and insufficient succor.

Mentally ill parents don’t purposely lead their children astray. Yet, at times, their vision of themselves and their children’s strengths is distorted by a desire to wish themselves well, denying their inability to look after and shelter others.

Mania’s grandiosity and depression’s lethargy can lead to inadequate parenting. When you’re up, everything goes along easily, or so you think. Lubricated by overblown desire for well-being, a mentally ill parent can ignore the threats to the safety of their children, or the taking care of their physical needs. We live in a world of all-expanding possibilities, deluding ourselves about our impairment. When depressed, all seems lost. The simplest action is often overwhelming. It is at those times of diminished adequacy that neglect can arise.

Parents, grandparents, and family friends need to keep an adequate eye out for relatives or friends who may be falling short of adequate parenting. Stepping in to assure children’s safety and the need-to-be-children may be necessary. Even when the most loving thing you can do is to be in touch with a social service agency to engage proper child supervision, don’t be filled with guilt or a competing desire not to be cast in the role of disciplinarian. Those less fortunate or inadequate to care for their own needs still require your help. If family can’t intercede, your local church or government agency may need to.

For those with mental illness, disabilities can get in the way if you’re unable to shoulder parenting. Sometimes it is just until you recover that social support is called for. Don’t be blind to your children’s needs. Let your love be for their nurturing.