Perspective: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Family-Focused Practice With Parents With Mental Illness and Their Families.

The goal of this perspective piece is to suggest challenges to family-focused practice with parents with mental illness and their children that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss implications for practice, policy, and research that will benefit from rigorous study in the future, as we sift through lessons learned. The impact of the pandemic on the mental health and well-being of people around the world has been documented. Common adaptations in service delivery have included a shift to telehealth and digital tools. The pandemic has posed challenges to practice across the EASE Framework components for family-focused practice (i.e., Engage, Assess, Support, and Educate) for both parents/families and practitioners. Governmental policy and funding responses will be critical to addressing the impact of stresses, disruptions and losses endured during the past months. Pandemic experiences and consequences have implications for research measures, methods, and outcomes, given the dramatic changes in people's lives and the contexts in which they live. The shift to research implementation in virtual environments has resulted in challenges in maintaining confidentiality, and the privacy and security of data. As we move forward, it will be important to acknowledge the remaining uncertainty about the future and accommodate the profound changes in family life, professional practice, and research implementation related to the pandemic in our efforts to demonstrate the effectiveness of positive lessons learned while developing new approaches for dealing with the negative consequences of the pandemic.

Promoting Self-Determination in Parents With Mental Illness in Adult Mental Health Settings.

This article reports a strengths-based intervention to support parents with mental illness and their children in adult mental health settings: "Let's Talk About Children" (LTC) intervention. A qualitative methodology was adopted with parent participants receiving LTC in adult mental health and family services. The benefits for parents receiving LTC were described through in-depth interviews with 25 parents following the delivery of the program. Interview data identified an impact on parental self-regulation-mainly through a change in a sense of agency as a parent-and skill building, once a clearer picture of their child's everyday life was understood. This study outlines the benefits of talking with parents about the strengths and vulnerabilities of their children during routine mental health treatment. The role for self-determination of parents in preventive interventions for children is an important consideration for mental health recovery, and it also helps to break the cycle of transgenerational mental illness within families.