Should people struggling with mental illness have children?

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12/29/2025 12:26

Subject: Should people struggling with mental illness have children?

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Where do you draw the line? Why stop at mental illness? Should people with genetic defects have children? Who gets to decide what counts?

This is what I don’t get. There are more devastating diseases than anxiety or depression. Unlike many diseases, mental illness can be treatable and people live normal lives. I think a lot of people who had miserable mothers or fathers like to blame it on mental illness when in fact they are just miserable abusive people.

Mental illness is so complex. Consider a married mother in the 1950s who seemed despondent, unmotivated, and uncommunicative. She'd be sent to a doctor, who would diagnose her with something like "hysteria", prescribe barbiturates, and tell her husband that if it doesn't get better, he might consider institutionalization. That lady was just depressed, and somewhat justifiably so, as she had little agency in her life, was probably pushed into marriage and motherhood regardless of her personal desires, and likely not treated very well by her husband. But instead her perfectly understandable mental health issues would be pathologized as psychosis. She *did* have mental illness, but it was treatable. However society had no space for her, so she was ostracized.

My husband had an uncle who was deemed mentally ill by his family and disappeared from their lives entirely when he was about 20 years old, only to resurface when he died. Folks, he was gay. He lived a perfectly normal life as a gay man (though with financial difficulties due to struggles with employment and likely the fact that he had zero support or help from his family of origin), had a partner of multiple decades, owned a home, etc. This man was not mentally ill, he was abused and mistreated by his family and society. I'm sure he had mental health issues as a result of that history, but does he carry some genetic predisposition for mental illness? No.

My own parents both have mental health problems. They also both grew up in abusive homes with alcoholic parents, like a TON of boomers. WWII sent a lot of men home to their families with severe PTSD. Were all these people genetically predisposed for mental illness OR is severe trauma sometimes really freaking hard to overcome, especially when society doesn't understand it and you get limited support or treatment?

Even the people you know with really severe mental health issues like untreated bipolar disorder or narcissistic personality disorder? In many cases they may have had more run of the mill mental health problems combined with abuse, neglect, rejection by their family or church or community. I'm not saying this justifies the negative behaviors such people engage in, but just pointing out that in many cases, mental illness is not some static thing hard coded onto your DNA. Some limited number of people may be born with a condition like schizophrenia, though even that we don't understand well.

People who cannot care for themselves and who dont' know how to care for children shouldn't have them. But the idea that a person should avoid having children because of some history of mental illness in their family is absurd. There would simply be no children. I guarantee your family has some history of mental illness in it. You might not be aware of it, your family might not have called it that, it might have presented in a way that allowed them to call it something else, but I guarantee it's there. Your genes have been through wars, famines, migrations, oppression. I guarantee you someone in your family dealt with it in a dysfunctional way at some point. It's human.