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1.The Outcomes of a Guided Community Development Approach to Supporting Families with Parental Mental Illness:

Robert Lees, Ed.D., Nicole Chovil, PhD,  & Krystelle Heinrichs, M.A.

Abstract

There has been a considerable interest over the past decade in raising awareness of the challenges faced by parents who have a mental illness and identifying best practices for supporting families. In 2002 the Ministry of Health and Ministry Children and Family Development in British Columbia, Canada funded the development of a guide for communities to host a forum on parental mental illness (PMI). The aim of the forum was to increase mental health literacy regarding issues faced by families with PMI and to act as a springboard whereby communities could begin to work collaboratively to develop action plans for supporting families.  This article reports on a systematic effort to review the outcomes of these community forums. A mixed method design was utilized to review outcomes of 10 forums held in the five regions of the province, in both rural and urban settings. Six hundred and ten stakeholders from diverse community based perspectives participated in the forums. Participants rated the impact of the forum on knowledge and attitudes at the end of the forum. In the months following the forum, a percentage of participants were interviewed about their experience in the forum. The results, based on 340 returned questionnaires and 77 interviews using the Critical Incident Technique converged on several key areas of parental mental illness literacy. Both quantitative and qualitative data suggest the value of this structured process for community education and development in mental health collaborative care. The forums also resulted in some unintended benefits such as service provider empowerment and increased empathy towards parents with mental illness.

Key Words: parental mental illness, community forum, collaborative practice