We have created a strong collaborative network of researchers, community partners (including carers, health professionals, charities, and schools), and parent carers. Understanding these responses to the stress of caring may be the key to better supporting all parent carers and ensuring sustainable, quality care for children with disabilities. As a result, parent carers must do ever more with ever less and anecdotal accounts of suicidal and homicidal carers abound. Advances in medical technology are allowing children with disabilities to live longer than ever before, but government investment in health and social care is dwindling. This collaboration addresses Health, Demographic Change, and Wellbeing. In parent carers, however, these phenomena have been explored in only three studies internationally and none in the UK.

Research on other family carers – including those caring for parents and partners with dementia, cancer, and HIV – has revealed rates of suicidal ideation four times that of the general population, as well as evidence of homicidal ideation and self-harm. The challenges of caregiving may also lead some parents to harm themselves and contemplate killing themselves and/or the child for whom they care. Parent carers continue to experience high rates of physical and mental illness, social isolation, and financial strain. Six decades of research and numerous policy and legislative initiatives have sought to address the negative sequalae of caring, but to little avail. More than 800,000 children in the UK are disabled and the vast majority are cared for by their parents. Carers who are experiencing thoughts of suicide or homicide, are self-harming, or are otherwise in need of urgent support should contact The Samaritans on 116 123. The acronym SHuSH ! reflects the silence that has, to-date, surrounded these issues in research, practice, and policy. SHuSH ! is a network of researchers, carers, clinicians, and community organisations working together to develop and conduct world-leading research on suicide, homicide, and self-harm in parents caring for children with disabilities. University of Warwick: Professor Richard Hastings

University of Exeter: Siobhan O’Dwyer, Astrid Janssens (Co-PIs) University of Bristol: Becky Mars, Lucy Biddle, Paul Moran University of Bath: Katie Maras, Paul Stallard

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