Thursday, we will take up mental illness and developmental disability as sources of family stress. Chapter 8 of our textbook defines mental illness in terms of "abnormality in an individual's mood, cognition, emotion, behaviors, or integration of behaviors..." (p. 181). There has been extensive research on social/interpersonal aspects of interacting with someone with a mental disorder, which we will discuss (see the links section on the right).

The Wikipedia defines developmental disability in terms of "life-long disabilities attributable to mental and/or physical or combination of mental and physical impairments, manifested prior to age twenty-two." Examples include Autism, Cerebral Palsy, and Down Syndrome. These Wikipedia entries include discussion of the social/interpersonal aspects of life for people with these conditions.

As far as family stress where a member has a developmental disability, we will revisit one of the articles from the handout covering measures of family stress (Nachshen and colleagues, 2003, The Family Stress and Coping Interview for families of individuals with developmental disabilities... Journal of Intellectual Disability Research).

By coincidence, the same issue of JIDR includes a study by Saloviita and colleagues ("Explaining the parental stress of fathers and mothers caring for a child with an intellectual disability: A Double ABCX Model") that fits nicely with what we've been covering all along. These authors' main findings are described as follows:

The original stressor variables, or the characteristics of the child (the aA factor), predicted only 2% of the stress of mothers and 8% of the stress of fathers... In contrast to this, the mediating variables of family resources (the bB factor) accounted for 42% of the stress of mothers and 33% of the stress of fathers, and family definition of the situation (the cC factor) explained 29% of the stress of mothers and 37% of the stress of fathers. ...in all, the results indicate that the way in which parents define their situation and the various resources available to them are more important in the prediction of parental stress than properties of the child. ...The relatively small predictive power of the original stressor, i.e. the characteristics of the child, may be seen as encouraging because changing the disability of the child might be more difficult than changing the attitudes or perceptions of the parents.

The definition of the parental situation as a 'catastrophe' was overwhelmingly the most important component in explaining parental stress. In mothers, this component was associated with the challenging behaviour of the child, whereas in fathers, it was associated with the perceived social acceptance of the child. In mothers, the most important resource was informal support, but in fathers, it was spousal support (pp. 308-309).