Review question
How effective are parenting programmes for people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness?
Background
Around one third of people with schizophrenia are a parent. Parenting programmes aim to provide support and training for parents to help manage their child's behaviour. Targeted parenting programmes for this group could have a positive effect for both the parents and their children. This review aimed to gather the current evidence for parenting programmes for people with schizophrenia or related mental illness to understand whether such support is effective at improving parenting skills or parent-child interaction.
Searching
We ran an electronic search in March 2020 and February 2021 for randomised controlled trials of parenting programmes aimed at people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness. We found 36 studies and checked these to see if they were relevant to our research.
Available evidence
One trial met the review requirements but did not provide usable data. Therefore, there is not enough robust evidence to know anything about the effectiveness of parenting programmes for people with schizophrenia or related mental illness.
Conclusions
There is not enough evidence to make recommendations about parenting programmes for people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness. Future research should conduct rigorous studies to test the effectiveness of parenting programmes that have already been designed.
Vollständige Zusammenfassung lesen
Around a third of people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness will be a parent. Both the parents and the children in this population are at increased risk of adverse outcomes due to parental mental illness. Parenting interventions are known to improve parenting skills and decrease child disruptive behaviour. This systematic review aimed to synthesise the evidence base for parenting interventions designed specifically for parents who have schizophrenia or related serious mental illness.
Zielsetzungen
To assess the effects of parenting interventions for people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness.
Suchstrategie
On 10 February 2021 we searched the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group's Study-Based Register of Trials, which is based on the following: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), ClinicalTrials.Gov, Embase, International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN), MEDLINE, PsycINFO, PubMed, and the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.
Auswahlkriterien
Eligible studies were randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that compared parenting interventions with a control condition for people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness with a child between the ages of 0 and 18 years.
Datensammlung und ‐analyse
We independently inspected citations, selected studies, extracted data and appraised study quality. We assessed risk of bias for included studies.
Hauptergebnisse
We only included one trial (n = 50), and it was not possible to extract any data because the authors did not provide any means and standard deviations for our outcomes of interest; they only reported whether outcomes were significant or not at the 0.05 level. Three domains of the trial were rated as having a high risk of bias.
Schlussfolgerungen der Autoren
The only included trial provided inconclusive evidence. There is insufficient evidence to make recommendations to people with schizophrenia (or related serious mental illness) or clinicians, or for policy changes. Although there is no RCT evidence, parenting interventions for people with schizophrenia or related serious mental illness have been developed. Future research should test these in RCTs in order to improve the evidence base for this population.
