Possible Self Content and Action: Impact of Maternal Mental Illness on Teens' Mental-Health Focused Possible Selves and Action Strategies

Background and Purpose: Possible selves are content-based desired and feared images of ones' future self, and when linked to strategies, can be spring-boards to positive action in the present. This study builds on prior work on mental health and possible selves by examining the impact of maternal mental illness on youths' possible selves. Maternal serious mental illness increases risk that teens will have psychiatric symptoms, and having psychiatric symptoms is associated with more feared possible selves. However, action strategies to address feared possible selves can help youth avoid negative outcomes. In this study, we ask what factors influence the development of feared possible selves focused on mental-illness, and what mothers can do to increase the likelihood that youth develop action strategies to address these fears. We examine associations between youth possible self content and strategies and maternal diagnosis, maternal separations, current youth symptoms, and mother-youth communication about mental illness. Method: Maternal interview data were collected in 3 face-to-face interviews, approximately 20 months apart. Six weeks after the third maternal interview, youth were interviewed (also face-to-face). Data collected in the maternal interviews included maternal diagnosis (Diagnostic Interview Schedule), number of psychiatric hospitalizations and separations from target child, and mother-child communication about mental illness. In youth interviews, data were collected on current symptoms of anxiety (Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale) and depression (Children's Depression Inventory), and on possible self content and action strategies. Youth were asked to imagine themselves as adults and list what they expected to be like and what they were afraid they might be like. Content was coded by domain, allowing us to focus on mental-illness focused possible selves. Next, youth were asked to describe what (if anything) they were doing anything to work on the possible self. Strategies were counted, and a summative plausibility score was obtained by rating the total number of mental illness-focused possible selves and strategies geared at those possible selves. Results: Structural equation modeling of maternal and youth reports demonstrate that youth had more mental-illness focused possible selves when maternal diagnosis was bipolar disorder, when they experienced early maternal separations and when they had current symptoms. Importantly, youth had more strategies to deal with these possible selves when mothers communicated about their mental health problems. Conclusions and Implications: These results have optimistic implications for youth resiliency in the face of stressors caused by maternal mental illness. While mothers cannot change the fact that they had a mental illness or were separated from their child in his or her early years, they can engage their teenage child in conversation about symptoms, explain that he/she is not at fault for the illness, and outline what might be expected in the future. In doing so, mothers can help their children to develop strategies to cope with their mothers' symptoms and fears about their own mental health. Implications for policy and intervention development will be discussed.