Parenting while living with behavioral health challenges
Ocean State Stories ByG. Wayne Miller May 23, 2025
“My mental illness may make me feel badly at times, but it will never stop me from loving you.”
Parenting while living with behavioral health challenges
“My mental illness may make me feel badly at times, but it will never stop me from loving you.”
CUMBERLAND – When Marlena Davis became pregnant eight years ago, she decided to write a letter to her unborn child. A single mother who conceived via intrauterine insemination, Davis, now 51, lives with anxiety and depression.
“My beautiful baby to be,” Davis wrote in that letter, “I am going to be your mom, and I am different from a lot of moms around because I live with mental illness: depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That means my brain gets sick sometimes and I feel really worried, sad, or scared. So, I may cry a lot. I may feel shaky and nervous. My mind may go back to a time when I got hurt badly.
“I am telling you this because I want you to know your mom will sometimes feel this way due to her brain, but never because of anything you did. Some people who live with these things decide not to be parents; some people feel that those who live with mental illness shouldn’t have children at all, and some people do. It took a lot of thought for me to decide to have you, and although it is scary at times I never regret that decision.”
Her son is now seven and a first-grader in a Cumberland public school. Davis says he knows about and accepts her illness – and he brings unparalleled joy to her and her relatives and friends.
“He’s academically gifted,” Davis told Ocean State Stories in a recent interview. “He has his own struggles with ADHD, but he’s very smart. He loves to read at home, he loves his electronics, and he likes to go on YouTube Kids and play video games. He also loves, loves, to be active! He’s done soccer for a while and right now he’s doing . . . track because Cumberland has a great program. And swimming is his passion. I am super proud of him. He’s had his struggles, but he was student of the month in March for his class, which is huge for him.”
Davis said she cares for herself with therapy, medication, and virtual meetings every Wednesday evening with a handful of friends, most of whom also live with mental illness, in what she described as “a little support group.” Its origins lie in a Butler Hospital support program that closed during the COVID pandemic and was never revived.
For almost seven years now, Davis has worked at Project Friends, a day program operated by the town of Coventry for adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Before that, she was employed for two decades at The Groden Center in Providence.
“I think being a parent with mental illness makes you sometimes more sensitive to things,” Davis said. “I’m just more aware. Sometimes I’ll be really cranky, and what have you, all of the day. And I’ll notice it, and then I’m like, wait a second, ‘it’s not about [my son]. It’s about me.’ He appreciates that.”
Addressing parents who do, Pisciotta told Ocean State Stories that their health “could make it difficult for them to feel like you are fully engaged and fully present in their child’s life, because depression is exhausting. It really takes it out of you. You’re more tired. You have a tendency to want to isolate. You might not be eating as normal. So perhaps that would affect your children’s meals as well. If you have anxiety about things you can’t control and you’re living with this constant cloud of depression and anxiety, I imagine that it makes it hard to manage stress.”
Pisciotta understands mental health challenges not only from her professional work but also her personal journey.
“I’m definitely an anxious person and yes, I do have a history of clinical depression,” She said. “And at times in my life, it’s been quite severe.
Her awareness began in childhood.
“As a kid, I can remember being moody, miserable, lonely, and isolated and angry. But those are all symptoms of depression in a young person. And then as I got older, I think I made more friends and I was less lonely and maybe more confident but still had this low-grade depression. And then when I was 17, I developed anorexia nervosa. I lost a significant amount of weight. I was disappearing a little each day, and luckily my mom had the right insurance with the right coverage because I got four weeks of residential treatment, four weeks of partial hospitalization, and 15 months of outpatient therapy, and all of those levels of care were needed for me to make a full recovery.
“Since that time, I’ve never relapsed with anorexia, but I do still experience bouts of depression. I do take an antidepressant, and I know that I’m susceptible to more severe depression when I’m overworked, when I’m not sleeping well, when I’m not eating well, when I’m not managing stress well. So it’s not that I see myself as fragile, but I do see myself as having a pre-existing condition that makes me need to be aware and check in with myself more regularly about am I eating well, am I sleeping enough? Am I taking on more than I can handle?”
Payment for services parents need can be another impediment to help, Pisciotta said.
“Having insurance or being in the Medicaid program are essential to managing and/or recovering from mental illness, including substance use disorders. Most of us can’t afford to pay out of pocket for psychiatrists or psychologists or even therapists and certainly not medications as well. So insurance can be a barrier for many Rhode Islanders, whether you have it or you don’t.”
“I see a lot of moms who come in who are very motivated for treatment in motherhood, which is really great because they see and they understand how their health impacts their child’s health,” Dr. Jessica Pineda said in an online interview. Pineda is the Medical Director at Women & Infants Hospital’s Women’s Behavioral Health program and an assistant professor in the departments of Psychiatry & Human Behavior and Family Medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.
