With: Getting There Together Group, Upper Fern Tree Gully, Victoria, Australia Parent Support Group, Women's Clinic, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada

Getting There Group, Croydon, Victoria, Australia

Parent Support Group, Employment Options Inc., Marlboro, Massachusetts, USA

Parents want professionals to treat them ‘the same as everybody else’. They want professionals to see them as parents before they see them as patients, and for services to acknowledge their family relationships and responsibilities, and credit them with the capacity to act in their children's best interests. They want to be treated with dignity.

The 19 parents who contributed to this chapter come from four parent groups in Australia, Canada and the USA. They were approached through the coordinators of the parent groups listed above, and asked to respond to the questions: ‘How do you want services to respond to your needs as parent? How do you want them to respond to the issues that affect your families and children?’

This chapter coordinates their responses, often reproduced verbatim. Having agreed to participate, each group met for 1.5 hours, and their responses are summarized by the main author of this chapter (VC). Their comments highlight the impact of legislation, access to public housing, service provision for the mentally ill and the ways that states intervene in the welfare of children. They also reflect very different experiences of interventions, often painful, such as having their children removed from their care.

Parents have written personal accounts about their experiences of mental illness previously as consumers of mental health services and as parents (Aridas & ‘Christine’, 1999; Kelly, 1999).