Family Caregiver Interview With Family

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Family/Caregiver Term Paper For my family caregiver project, I interviewed my neighbor. She is an adult woman with a father who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was very interested in speaking with her because my chief focus of studying disability studies is to get a better understanding of mental illness as a disability and how it is treated by society at large. To that end for this project I am interested in investigating how and why mental illness impacts our immediate family dynamics. One of our building block relationships is the parent-child relationship therefore I strongly believe that the family must be involved in the treatment and education process of the person with the serious mental illness to thrive. Moreover, it is my position …show more content…

Van der Sanden, Bos, Sutterheim, Pryor & Kok (2013) theorized that perceived public stigma plays a profound role in psychological distancing and a lessening of the perceived closeness felt toward a person with mental illness. This is proven to have some truth in my interview with my neighbor. She cannot bring herself to even called her father “Dad” anymore she now only refers to him by first name. Furthermore, there is a deep anger and hurt that her father is no longer the father that she has these idealized childhood memories of. There are a no more bonding over doing projects together. Gone are the fond memories of having family dinner and then retiring to the living room to watch Jeopardy. The importance of this study of the stigma from this different vantage point is in its giving us a broader understanding to why there are family dynamics manifest the way they do when mental illness is present. If we are not aware of it wholeness of the problem then we will remain ill-equipped to combat it and ultimately achieve positive

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