And the situation may be bigger than many have thought, since the move to community rather than hospital care has allowed people, rightly, to develop relationships more easily and to have children. But it s by no means possible to identify those children, who are children now, who may develop psychosis later in life. The disruption in the home, poverty, housing problems, disruptions to children due to parents being hospitalised, and the environment is quite a contributing factor. Vicki Cowling gives one example of a family with five children where the mother had schizophrenia and the father had left home. Now two of her siblings developed schizophrenia but she h erself has coped and has a job and is coping very well.
People are afraid of mental illness, they just don t have enough information about it.
The other issue associated with that is coordination and collaboration between welfare, adult health, child health, and the private, non government agencies, the education sector, housing, etcetera, so that there s a collaborative and coordinated approach to working with the families as families. And that is starting to happen, I believe. In the Liverpool area of New South Wales there s a group called Gaining Ground . And the other area is having a flexible attitude related to the fluctuation of mental illness, that parents can t just use a service for six weeks and then finish with the service. They may need the service on and off for many years while children are growing.