Interventions for Parents With Mental Illnesses: A Scoping Review

Mental health professionals encounter many patients with mental disorders who are also parents. Parenting is often more challenged in parents with mental disorders, but can also motivate change. In family treatment parents with a wide range of mental illness are seen. To guide mental health professionals in their service provision to patients who are also parents, a literature search was conducted for an overview of interventions for parents with a broad range of mental illnesses. One hundred twenty-seven studies were found. Most studies focused on interventions for participants with a single disorder without comorbid problems: mostly depression (62 studies). Almost no interventions for parents with personality disorders and none for parents with autism were found. Described interventions focused mostly on improving the quality of the parent-child relationship, and to a lesser extent on improving psychological well-being of the parent or child behavior. Most interventions to improve the quality of the dyadic parent-child relationship used an attachment-based framework, especially for younger children. For improving parental psychopathology cognitive behavioral techniques were mostly used, and effective. Treatment will likely work reciprocally: improved parenting skills will also improve parental psychopathology and vice versa. Generally, the duration of the intervention was associated with the severity of family problems. New ways for (group) treatment may be found in online interventions. Inclusion of the partner or other family members in treatment has been found to be beneficial. Most studies did not include a long follow-up period, and the ones that did usually showed that effects did not last.