Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
55/584 page 27
![Some Paradoxes Connected with Risk and Vulnerability 27 in time for better or worse, and parents who are good parents at one stage of a child's life may not be good at another stage, and families may be favorable for one type of child and not for another. Unpredictable Vulnerabilities It is known that the intellectual impairment in a child with cerebral palsy is not proportional to the extent of the neurological lesions ascertained. There is even more reason, outside the field of evident organic illness, for forecasting to be difficult. Macroscopic factors manifest themselves, but the factors that protect or render the child more fragile are often microscopic and fugitive, or so that observation is difficult. The children of psychotic parents are deemed to be at risk, but, as Winnicott pointed out, there may be mitigating circumstances. At stages of development, these parents can meet their children's needs. The most pernicious factor, according to Winnicott, is the unpredictability of mood changes [14]. In a recent work Lebovici [11] found that the open recognition by all of the parental illness as an accepted fact is a protective factor for the child, who would be in greater danger living with unrecognized borderline parents. Unfortunately not all indisputably psychotic parents are under care, or even recognized as ill. In our longitudinal study, 3 out of the sample of 66 children (Nicolas, Paulette, and Berthe) had mothers with incontestable psychoses; 2 of the 66 had been seen by a psychiatrist (Nicolas' mother was schizophrenic and Paulette's mother delusional, but neither was under treatment). On making a home visit the social worker was horrified by the appalling conditions in which these children lived. Berthe's mother was unwed and suffered from delusions of reference. She had never consulted a psychiatrist and was not officially recognized as ill, and, as a consequence, there was no one in contact with the home to protect the child. These three children were not suffering from childhood psychosis. Nicolas had been diagnosed as prepsychotic at the age of 6 years and this was confirmed at age 11. The two others fell within the normal range at age 6; at most one was struck by Berthe's silliness in spite of a near normal intelligence and a satisfactory school record. Over the years, however, small signs have suggested the existence](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0056.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
