Schizophrenia Parents with Schizophrenia

Parents with a mental illness have been shown to have offspring that have an increased risk of developing psychiatric disorder themselves. A psychiatric illness in a parent can impact the emotional, social and behavioral aspects of their children's lives. Furthermore, there is also a stigma that is associated with schizophrenia that prevents detection and treatment of this disorder that in turn makes children more vulnerable to the effects of having a parent with the disorder. For instance, a number of studies have reported greater rates and greater severity of neurological, motor, and cognitive impairments among offspring of parents with schizophrenia. This was most pronounced among offspring of parents with schizophrenia: almost 20% of children from this group in one particular study exhibited some neurological dysfunction at birth compared to less than 6% of children of unaffected parents. This analysis will look at some of the implications that parents with schizophrenia can have on their children.

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Schizophrenia can be difficult to identify when it first manifests because there is a stigma associated with the disorder that is negative and prevents individuals from willfully seeking treatment for their disorder. One study used a Link's Devaluation-Discrimination...

The study used an intervention that consisted of a web-based educational program on schizophrenia and recorded stigma scores before and after watching the content.
The study found that the viewed of the web-based educational program had no significant effect on the population in general. However, the study focused on the individuals, whose level of stigma changed significantly, either increasing or decreasing, and was able to identify some factors that seem to be correlated with the changes. Among these factors were employment status and it was found that the individuals who were employed were more likely to decrease their stigma level compared to their unemployed counterparts and this was explained as possibly being related to the level of contact with a wider range of people with different predispositions.

Another study looked at the design and initial outcomes of the New England Family Study's (NEFS) High-Risk Project ) to prospectively identify and compare rates of childhood neurological impairments among offspring of psychotic and nonpsychotic parents, with a particular emphasis on offspring risk in relation to specific classes of parental psychosis (Buka, Seidman, Tsuang, &…