Borderline Families

When I started writing this blog in April, I had no idea where it would lead me. At that time, I wanted to publish a book that I had just completed and it had been suggested, repeatedly, that my topic, the search for help for my “mentally ill” daughter through treatment centers, psychiatrists offices, psych hospitals and emergency rooms throughout this country, was not going to pull in many readers. It didn’t have a good ending. The drama/chaos was unrelenting. Was it believable? The most unusual admonishment came from an agent who worried that my daughter would be hurt when she “got better” (back on the psych drugs) and realized what I had done to her.

I did some research and added to my agent letter this line: The book looks at the mental healthcare industry’s practices and treatments that often fail to help the nearly 58 million people who, according to the National Institute of Mental Illness, suffer from a diagnosable disorder in a given year in the US.

I knew that whenever I mentioned my book, it opened a floodgate in nearly everyone; few people in this country are not affected in some way by “mental illness”. Either a friend or family member has been depressed or anxious and they wanted to tell me about it. “My friend has something, I am sure of it.” “My son dropped out of his freshman year of college.” Suddenly, because I was willing to talk about “it”, I was an authority.

I started writing the blog feeling like a sham. I wondered who was I to use this internet platform to gather a following. I do not have a degree or a shingle to hang at my door.  This became uncomfortably obvious when an agent asked me the following series of questions:

Do I have a blog?

Do I write a weekly column on this subject for a newspaper?

Do I appear regularly on television discussing the topic of the book?

Have I published articles for journals pertaining to the topic?

No. No. No. I eked my responses in a smaller and smaller voice. My plummeting mid-western self-esteem finally forced me to admit that I was just a mom. A housewife with some good books at my disposal and a struggling daughter. I have held many jobs, run businesses, been respected in other fields, but this was my first book. This was met with silence. I could see this agent in his high-rise NYC office building looking down on poor, pitiful, unaccomplished me with a sad, upsetting story to tell.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I do have something to say. My book is a written account by a care-taker who for twenty-five years has been in the trenches. This credentialed me more than any of the doctors who spent fifteen minutes with my daughter and with professional confidence handed down yet one more devastating diagnosis.

Over the years I have acquired an insider’s knowledge of the grim world of the “mentally ill” but I have an outsider’s mind. I have been in lockstep with my daughter using trial and error and an unfathomable amount of endurance to try to find her some peace.

And I know. I know what the inside of a psych ward looks like and I know how the nurses size up their patients. I know how an emergency room doctor disdains a drunk young woman with a self-inflicted injury. I know how the staff of a renown psychiatric hospital deals with a vulnerable young adult and I would like to slap them down. I wrote the book fueled by this knowledge.

And, what I know now, that I didn’t when I started writing, is that the system that I had entrusted my daughter to is broken and was built on faulty information. It is a money-grubbing, high-stakes gambler with too many innocent peoples’ lives on the line.

So, I am happy that I didn’t find a sympathetic agent at the beginning of the year. I kept thinking all that needed to happen was that my manuscript land on the “right desk” of someone willing to admit publicly that my book’s topic was worth sticking one’s neck out for.

I used to think that the failure that I ended the book on was entirely my daughter’s. We were told enough times that she was treatment resistant, I started to believe it.

The book ended on a sad note. I realized that I could only save myself. I prepared for more sadness.

I started blogging a few months after finishing the book and a remarkable story began to unfold. I discovered tales of survival and recovery – without  drugs and, more importantly, without the support of the medical model I had come to believe it. A dam broke when I read Robert Whitaker’s book.

I now put parenthesis around the words “mentally ill” because I am convinced that that language encourages the stigma that is attached to people suffering with mental problems. It is very different to have an illness than to have a problem. I am revising my descriptions of what my daughter experiences.

The best part of this story is that I realized that my daughter, too, had intuitively saved her life by rejecting the system. She stepped away and I slowly followed.

In my last post, I praised the work of Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds and I should mention that there have been many more bloggers who have helped me unlock the mystery that hung over the original manuscript. Susan at A Journey, Darlene at Emerging from Broken, Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher, to  name just a few. I have also learned from the people dealing daily with mental issues who take the time to answer my questions and show me how they negotiate their lives – Bippidee, Sandy, Karen, Amanda, and Susan among others. And the mothers and fathers who share their stories – Barbara, Anna, Renee, Rossa, Heather’s mom, Victoria, Sallyo, Kris, Bristolvol, Rose. My blogroll is full of heart-wrenching tragedies and unbridled triumphant successes. Thank you ALL for sharing your stories.

Kris Uncategorized