What is it like to be a mentally ill parent

Seriously mentally ill people should not have children and pollute the gene pool even further.

Honestly, my childhood was fucked as Hell dude, lmao. I'm not sterilized yet, but I sure do wanna be. :D Do you know of any doctors in the US who won't scoff at my desire to not produce children?

Serious question. :)

my father was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I was born, but later that diagnosis was changed to bipolar disorder with psychotic features or smth? He's just incredibly fucking weird and stubborn and refuses to be a normal, reasonable person sometimes. He is alternatingly the kind of man to sleep through a tornado, and to be jolted awake by a mouse sneezing. He is a supremely right-wing fundie who sits there watching the 700 club (Jim bakker is always on when i see him), and he used to shit with the bathroom door open for some reason (he would do this while wearing only socks and a "alabama" ball-cap while old-timey gospel music would play on this little portable radio he caried with him everywhere, including the bath tub).

He once did something so "disgusting" that my mother wouldn't talk to him for days. She vented to me about how offended it made her, but refused to tell me what it was. Part of me wants to know, part of me doesn't.

He has complained that because me and the rest of the kids "don't love him enough," that he's not going to give us an inheritance of any kind, and instead he's just gonna donate it to some kind of end-times-zionist prophecy thingy, but also to saving the fetuses and keeping god in the classroom.

he has horrible mood-swings and behaves in a paranoid fashion when he doesn't get his meds. he also talks to himself a lot.

I'm relatively sure that my mother is a narcissist. She says bullshit like, "I am always right", and, "I can never be wrong". Sometimes she refers to herself in third person.

That sounds like excellent advice, thank you.

I am a mother and lucky not to suffer with any mental illness, but I do know other women who suffer them. One is clinically depressed and has repeatedly attempted suicide because she thinks her son would suffer less if she died and stopped being such a burden. That's pretty sad. She's in hospital so it's unlikely she'll be successful in any suicide attempts, but she keeps on trying.

I know another who is schizophrenic but I haven't seen her since she had her daughter. Apparently she takes hee meds but still needs to be in hospital. I think the father and the grandmother look after the kid. When I get emails from her she speaks very highly of her child and thinks she's amazing. I don't think it's even occurred to her that her illness may impact the child. For all I know, maybe it doesn't. It's hard to say if you're not part of their family.

Just study psychology. Mental illness and the like affect everyone, so if you learn about what makes people mentally ill and what that's like, all you have to do is add in the fact that they are responsible for the life of a child

So a narcissistic parent would always say the child is wrong for x, y, and z and could never even begin to see that problems are coming from themselves

Someone who only knows how to respond to anger rather than the situation will feel justified for acting out anger since it's the kid's fault for making them angry. They could never see their part in things by responding to their anger rather than the situation itself

If they're addicted to drugs and alcohol and they can't scratch their itch then it's okay for them to overreact to a child who doesn't even know which home they'll be sleeping in next week and, I dunno, smother them with a pillow and snack them because for the child it's either remain invisible or like try to interact with their parent, as off putting that might seem to someone who became clean enough to regain custody and then went right back to old habits as soon as they did

Or maybe a caregiver who was raised in a different culture, the south maybe, who married into your family of the north who thinks it's perfectly acceptable to criticize ways of life that don't directly align with theirs. That might be narcissism again, or megalomania maybe lol

So yeah, just study psychology and apply what you learn to parents, or people in general. Not everyone should be a parent. Most people think just by being pregnant or housing an infant or child they're such great people. Truth is there are a lot of people who aren't ready or suited to be parents, sex is just too good to pass up so they wind up with a baby in the same way people look at adopting a pet

Don’t know and never had any experience with that but mentally ill people should be sterilised, they have no place raising children

It depends what kind of mental issues you have. If its just anxiety you can usually work around that. Schizophrenia on the other hand is harder.