Psychiatric morbidity in mothers of children attending primary care facility in Ilorin, Nigeria: drawing attention to those affected concurrently with their children.

Objective: To determine the prevalence of psychiatric morbidity among mothers of children attending a primary care clinic in University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital as precursor to developing an intervention programme.

Method: WThree hundred fifty mothers of children aged 7-14 years were screened with the 12-item General Health Questionnaire for psychiatric morbidity. As part of the larger study, their children were screened for psychiatric disorders with the parents' version of the Child Behaviour Questionnaire, and a subsample of 157 mother/child dyad had second-stage interview with the children's version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia to determine psychiatric morbidity in these children.

Results: Twenty-eight out of 350 mothers (8%) had probable psychiatric morbidity. Mothers with psychiatric morbidity were significantly more likely to have children with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition psychiatric diagnosis (8 of 28, P=0.011), experience parenting difficulties with some of their children (13 of 28, P=0.000) and have poor husband support for the care of their children.

Conclusion: The presence of psychiatric morbidity in mothers may require that other members of the family especially the children be screened for psychiatric disorders particularly when there are parenting difficulties and poor spousal support; in this way primary prevention or control can effectively be carried out.