Divorce, Parenting, and Mental Illness
It’s easy to think that a parent who is legitimately mentally ill shouldn’t be living alone with their children — but every parent is important to their children, even if they have their issues. In many cases, a mentally ill parent who takes the appropriate medication and regularly attends counseling for their illness can be a very effective parent. However, extremes of emotional stress — such as those associated with a divorce — can dramatically exacerbate mental illness.
Even if a mentally ill parent has been functioning well for years, tending to their child’s needs and participating in their family life with their spouse, a divorce will tend to bring out the illness. Compounding that is the fact that the spouse who is requesting the divorce will tend to focus on the existence of the illness, even if it hasn’t affected their children’s lives.
Suddenly, the several hours each day that the child spend alone with the mentally-ill patient change from being perfectly normal and unquestioned to being strange and scary to the spouse. They may justify their previous decision with the knowledge that they would be home every day in order to make sure everything was OK. Once divorced, however, that’s not the case any longer, and suddenly the idea of leaving their child with a mentally ill ex-spouse can trigger somewhat baseless fears.
Clearly, the courts will take mental illness into account when determining how much parenting time a given parent will have — and whether it will be supervised or not. But they will also carefully examine how well the mental illness has been under control, and for how long. They’ll attempt to determine how much danger, if any, the mental illness will risk for the children. So long as the parent has the ability to establish and maintain emotional ties with the child, however, there will almost always be some form of contact.
Because the courts recognize that divorce tends to exacerbate mental illness, they may order supervised parenting time until such time as the mentally ill parent has recovered from the stress and chaos of the divorce, for example.
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