What is mental illness for a person? The turn of the twenty-first century is the culmination of a pace of change. Never before has human history experienced such a rapid transformation. This begs the question: what place do mentally ill people occupy in today's reality? They are one of the social groups that is completely lost in today's reality. As my research, among other things, has shown, the mentally ill person - a person who plays the role of the other in society - is still little understood by us. Many times the role of the mentally ill person, for those who have once entered it, accompanies them throughout their lives.

Mental illness manifests itself initially in social behaviour and is perceived as deviant behaviour. This is because, in the words of E. Goffman, 'the subtle balance between biologically derived drives and control mechanisms grounded in culturally derived norms is disrupted'. The withdrawal by the community of consent to behaviour that deviates from accepted norms, triggers a mechanism aimed at subjecting the individual to control, one form of which may be treatment. The stigmatisation of the illness and the sick person means that for many years the family is the last refuge for the mentally ill person, it is the group in which, he or she can still function and where he or she is tolerated. Withdrawal from the stigmatising circles comes after many unsuccessful attempts to take root in new social arrangements that offer the chance to live without a label.

Hence, it seemed important to undertake research into the impact of mental illness on family functioning in the city. When a doctor sees a patient in an outpatient clinic, he or she very often only observes the transformation of the disease process, but rarely has the opportunity to observe the changes taking place in the families of those who are ill. And it is only these changes that show the full extent of long-term mental illness.

The research covered families in which an adult child - suffering from schizophrenia - still lives with his parents and resides in the Chorzów area. The scope of the research analysis was determined by adopting the sociological definition of illness and the structural-functional concept of the Poznan school of family research, while the research was based on the concept and division of functions proposed by Z. Tyszka .

photo: ojoimages

In examining the impact of mental illness on family functioning, I have characterised the overall impact of the illness on the family, analysed several variables that fundamentally affect the changes resulting from the illness - these are the duration of the illness and the mental state of the person with the illness, as well as the number of psychiatric hospitalisations and their duration in order to later characterise the changes the illness has made in the performance of particular functions. I will attempt here to briefly discuss the process of family reorganisation as a result of mental illness.