Outcomes for children living in families with parental substance misuse and mental health issues can include poor school outcomes, early substance use, early involvement with the justice system and mental health problems. This chapter will discuss how families require acknowledgement and support for these and related problems such as ongoing stressors, including parenting difficulties, financial adversity and limited social connectedness. We know that outcomes for children raised in families with parental substance misuse or mental illness can be poor, with compromised outcomes from early infancy to adulthood well documented. These include impaired cognitive development and educational attainment, adolescent substance misuse and antisocial behavior, and mental health issues (Kuppens et al., 2020). In order to improve outcomes for children, families need to be provided with a therapeutic support plan that takes into a consideration the interplay between substance misuse and mental illness and other risk factors, such as intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, and socioeconomic disadvantage.

This chapter evaluates what the international and European human rights frameworks can offer, in terms of standard setting and avenues for international legal development and protection, to those irregular migrants who experience either mental health difficulties or have a psychosocial disability. The analysis in this chapter extends the normative frames of references to encompass ‘disability’, which is reconceptualised in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a transformative status and a human rights argument. This chapter triangulates human rights, public health and disability-sensitive arguments to assess the relations between mental health and human rights in the context of irregular migration in human rights law and jurisprudence. While the European Court of Human Rights’ deportation cases concerning people with mental health issues tend to reflect an overall emergency-oriented and predominantly biomedical approach to mental health, several UN human rights treaty bodies set out a more holistic conceptualisation of mental health and psychosocial disability. The latter approach promotes non-discriminatory psychosocial interventions to guarantee access to community-based mental health care services and the underlying determinants of mental health for everyone regardless of migration status.