![]() ![]() After all, I tried to be the perfect daughter, dutiful and quiet, because I feared triggering my mother. While raising my three children, I overreacted to normal childhood behavior and noises. I agonized over major and minor decisions, knowing my mother never let me forget a mistake. After years of being screamed at by my mother, I avoided conflict at all costs, giving in too easily in my personal and professional relationships. I never went into foster care, but like so many children who grow up in homes with mentally ill parents, I continue to endure the reverberations of years of emotional and physical abuse. ![]() Compared to their peers, they are twice as likely to be abused and more than twice as likely to be placed in foster care than other children, according to a 2011 study of data from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Mental Health. A 2020 Swiss study showed these children have a 3 to 5 times increased risk of developing mental health problems that require treatment. It’s a trail that is all too common for children of mentally ill parents, which are a high-risk population. Both Mom and Paula left a trail of damage they were oblivious to. Watching Paula create chaos in her daughter’s life was like watching my mother’s volatile, narcissistic and paranoid behaviors. Yvonne Liu, age 11, at her Michigan home. where, according to a recent study, 7.2 percent of children have at least one parent or guardian who has poor mental health, it’s important that we continue to see examples on our screens of what mental illness looks like. ![]() Decades later, curled up on my sofa in Los Angeles, I was reminded of that horrific day as I watched Andie MacDowell portray Paula, a mother with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, in the Netflix series, “Maid.”Ī lot has been said about the platform’s most-watched limited series, with many focused on how the show sheds light on domestic violence through the experience of Alex (played by MacDowell’s real-life daughter, Margaret Qualley), but what I haven’t seen enough of is how the series highlights the struggle of having a parent with a mental illness. ![]()
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