A staggering one in four adults in the United States will experience some level of mental illness during any given year, while one in 20 (about 13.1 million) live with a serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disease. There are currently more than 200 classified forms of mental illness, many of which do not affect a person’s capabilities as a parent.
If you are a parent with a mental illness, even if it is mild or well-controlled with medication and/or therapy, and you are going through a divorce that involves the allocation of parental responsibilities, you may be concerned that your diagnosis could affect your parenting time. Being diagnosed with a mental illness is rarely enough to cause a parent to lose parenting time.