Telephone Support for Mothers of Children with Mental Illness: What Mothers Discuss

Paper

Thursday, 20 July 2006

This presentation is part of : Psychiatric/Mental Health for Children and Adolescents

Kathleen Scharer, PhD, MS, BS¹, Linda D. Moneyham, DNS, RN², and Shirley Huisman-Jezowski, PhD, MSW, BA¹. (1) College of Nursing, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA, (2) College of Nursing, College of Nursing, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Learning Objective #1: describe the types of issues that mothers experience in dealing with their children with serious mental illness.
Learning Objective #2: analyze the needs of these mothers for different types of social support.

Purpose: When children with mental illness behave in unsafe ways, or are unmanageable, mothers typically bring them to the hospital for treatment with the expectation that their children will improve. However, with today’s brief hospitalizations, the children return home with little improvement. As a result, mothers are frustrated and wonder why they bothered with hospitalization. The purpose of the study was to test two different interventions aimed at providing increased support for these mothers. The mothers’ responses to the telephone intervention are discussed in this paper.

Method: The larger study was a quasi-experimental design, with three randomized groups: a web-based social support intervention group, a telephone social support intervention group and a control group. The data used for this presentation were from a sub-sample of the telephone social support intervention group. Mothers were called every two weeks by an experienced psychiatric registered nurse to discuss the child’s progress and how the mother was managing. The registered nurse provided information and helped the mother find more effective coping strategies. The telephone calls were recorded. These data were analyzed using content analysis.

Findings: Some common themes were identified. These include lack of services, inadequate funding for mental health care, impact of the child’s problems on the family, family financial problems, and the mother’s frustrations and sense of isolation.

Discussion: Mothers are typically the primary caregivers. They experience isolation from other mothers due to their child’s isolation from peers. If they are employed, their workday may be frequently interrupted by calls from the school about the child’s behavior. Mothers are desperate for assistance but rarely have good options within their own communities. For many of the mothers, the telephone support nurse becomes a lifeline in adjusting to the difficulties in raising a mentally ill child. Implications for nursing practice are included.

See more of Psychiatric/Mental Health for Children and Adolescents
See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)