The
UBICA II Project
Funded
by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany
Mentalisation-based
Parental Training for Mentally Ill Parents – Supporting Families
with Access to the Psychiatric Support System not to Pass on
Their Own Burdens to the Next Generation
The
goal of UBICA II is to support burdened parents in their
relationship with their children and to better understand the
effects of parental stress on the parent-child relationship. The
burden can be their own mental illness, their own difficult
childhood experiences or a current difficult life situation.
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At the
Aachen site, specialists from the Early Aid (“Frühe Hilfen”)
System (an institution of the German welfare system that
supports burdened families in coping with everyday life and
caring for very young children) are trained to better understand
and change parental psychological conditions that put a strain
on the relationship with their own children and can lead to
difficult interactions in order to support these families.
In
addition, we investigate whether support through social
networks has a positive effect on parents. At the Berlin and
Heidelberg sites, mentally ill parents who are currently in
psychiatric and/or psychotherapeutic treatment are offered
mentalization-based parental training. The focus of the
program is to gain a better understanding of what the child is
emotionally preoccupied with, e.g. what emotional states and
needs can be hidden behind difficult behavior and how parents
can understand and regulate their own difficult emotional
states in their relationship with their children.
This
parent training is scientifically investigated in a randomized
controlled study in which parents are randomly assigned to the
new or a conventional intervention. The conventional
intervention follows a psychoeducational approach by informing
about favorable parenting behavior and providing knowledge
about how parents can reduce their stress. The development of
our prevention program was based on previous results of our
research group (UBICA I - 1st funding period ). We found in
UBICA I that the ability to understand the child's needs is a
key characteristic of a positive parental relationship. If the
effectiveness of the program can now be demonstrated in UBICA
II, we aim to introduce it soon into the routine care of
psychiatric hospitals.
The
parent training is accompanied by several experimental
studies. We want to understand how the program unfolds its
effectiveness on parental behavior. In Berlin and Heidelberg
we want to find out how the parenting program affects the
concrete behavior between parents and child in different
situations (e.g. when playing together or during stress), but
also how biological processes such as hormone release, brain
activity or vegetative activity have an impact on the behavior
of parents and children. We also focus on the question of
whether parent training has an effect on the fine-tuning
(so-called synchrony) in the exchange between parents and
child.
Finally,
at our site in Aachen, we examine mothers from UBICA I who
were still in their teenage years at the time their child was
born. We look at how the relationship with the child succeeds
and how the child develops in comparison to children of adult
mothers. Again, the synchrony between mother and child and the
biological measures involved will be a focus of the study.
Prof. Dr.
Sabine Herpertz, Ubica-II coordinator
Early abuse
in life can have serious and long-lasting consequences for both
the directly affected individual and the next generation.
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Data from
UBICA-I, including mother-child dyads from Heidelberg and
Berlin, show that early-life abuse is associated with behavioral
and neural changes, including personality traits and care styles
of affected mothers that negatively affect the relationship with
their child. The children of these mothers, who are affected by
early-life abuse, have an increased risk of being abused and
developing mental disorders.
They
also show increased cortisol concentration in the serum and
reduced inhibition control. Functional imaging showed that
traumatized mothers, unlike non-traumatized mothers, pay more
attention to negative than positive interactions with their
child. It seems important whether the mother experienced abuse
in the early life, but is resilient, which means that she has
not developed a mental disorder (until the time of the
examination) or whether she has developed a mental disorder in
addition to the early abuse in later life.
Children of
mothers with early-life abuse and lifelong mental disorder seem
to be particularly stressed, showing the greatest impairments
and risks.
Romuald Brunner,
UBICA-I coordinator
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