"Had Mum started drinking again?" : A literary analysis of substance abuse and mental ill health from a child`s perspective.

The aim of this study is to examine how substance abuse and mental illnesses are portrayed in children’s literature from a child’s perspective. To achieve the aim, text analyses were performed on four selected works of children’s literature. The question asked is: in what way can the selected books function to support pupils in problematic family circumstances? The scientific approach of the study is hermeneutic. Hermeneutics means the theory of interpretation and concerns the creation of meaning and understanding through interpretations of texts. The analyses proceed from a hermeneutic model. The model shows how different components go together in the interpretation of a text. In the analyses the children’s literature is set in relation to the background chapter, which shows what the reality is like. The discussion considers the analyses in greater depth with the aid of the theory in order to investigate how readers with similar experiences can perceive and be affected by literature. We chose to design the study in this way because it reflects the hermeneutics. The results of the study show that the selected literature can affect the reader. The theory shows that people have a tendency to recognize themselves in literature and see their own problems at a distance, which helps the reader in real life. Through the literature the reader’s conceptual world can be expanded by new insights into their surroundings. The conclusions drawn in the study are that it is important to work with the Convention on the Rights of the Child in school, to explain to children that adults are not always in good health, and that children have a right to be children.