Mental Health Issues among Parents of Children with and without Intellectual Disability

The term Intellectual disability is a diagnostic term denoting the group of disconnected categories of mental functioning such as idiot, imbecile, and moron derived from early IQ tests, which acquired pejorative connotations in popular discourse. In the definition released by AAMR (Luckasson et al., 2002), mental retardation was described as a disability characterized by significant limitations both in intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior as expressed in conceptual, social and practical adaptive skills. The present study assessed the mental health issues among parents of children with and without intellectual disability. Parental Stress Index (PSI) (Abidin, 1995), was used to identify sources of stress in parent child sub systems. The Norbeck Social Support Questionnaire (NSSQ; Norbeck et al, 1995), was used to assess rates of the extent of perceived emotional support. Family Support Scale (Dunst et al, 1984) was used to assess the sources of family support available. Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CED-D; Radloff, 1977) was used to assess the current levels of depressive symptoms and mood. All these were administered on 120 mothers of Intellectual disabiled (ID) children aged 10 to 20 years and 120 mothers of healthy children with average intelligence (AI) as controls. The results revealed that, overall mothers of children with ID reported higher level of stress and are more depressed than mothers of children without ID. On the other hand, in terms of social and family support, mothers of ID children had significantly higher emotional support than mothers of children without ID. This may also be a reflection of the fact that even though in India the structure of the family has become nuclear; functionally families still operate within an extended social network.