Mental illness in the family is the topic of several books worth reading: five nonfiction, one fiction.
I. Remnants of a Life on Paper: A Mother and Daughter’s Struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder (2013) by Bea Tusiani, Pamela Tusiani, and Paula Tusiani-Eng
The “remnants” in question are from Pamela’s journals and visual art, culled posthumously.
At the age of 20 Pamela was diagnosed with severe depression. Following multiple hospitalizations and ECT treatments, though, she finally received the more accurate diagnosis of BPD (Dr. Lloyd Sederer, The Huffington Post). “Pamela was well into her journey of recovery when a series of treatment program and medical errors conspired to kill her. The awful irony was that she did not take her life, but irresponsible, stigmatizing and poor residential and medical care did.”
II. All the Things We Never Knew:Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness (2015) by Sheila Hamilton
Hamilton’s husband was diagnosed with bipolar disorder only six weeks before he took his own life.
She has held herself partially responsible. “I’d propose one more stage of grief to Kubler-Ross’s list in the case of suicide; forgiveness…In accepting responsibility for my part in David’s death, I was able to understand his sense of futility, the level of his psychic pain, and his unwillingness to face his illness. I forgave him. I forgave myself. And in doing so, I’ve been better able to understand his decision.”
III. Imagine Me Gone (2016) by Adam Haslett
This novel echoes a main theme from his highly acclaimed 2002 debut, You Are Not a Stranger Here. As Haslett told Scott Simon, NPR, he’s no stranger to mental illness in the family: “You know, my father committed suicide when I was 14. My brother indeed suffered from anxiety. And I’ve been no stranger to those states myself, luckily, for some unknown reason, not in the same severity of my father or brother.”
IV. The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (2017) by Gayle Brandeis
The book’s title takes its name from the documentary Brandeis’s 70-year-old mother Arlene was working on “about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.”
“Whether they were psychosomatically induced or not,” states Kirkus Reviews, “Arlene attested that the illnesses had been repeatedly dismissed or misdiagnosed by the medical community; even the author herself admits to suffering, as a teenager, from a combination of malingering and factitious disorder.”
V. No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America by Ron Powers
The author’s two sons were both afflicted with schizophrenia. One died from suicide.
It’s the loved ones who usually do care, of course. Shelf Awareness: “For the families of the mentally ill…caring about ‘crazy people’ is a necessity. In roughly alternating chapters, Powers allows us to watch his sons grow up, dealing with the challenges of incipient schizophrenia as well as tragic events that shape their young minds. All the while, Powers movingly relates the joys of raising creatively gifted children.”
VI. While You Were Out: An Intimate Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence (2023) by Meg Kissinger
On the surface, who knew? “But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding―a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it,” states the publisher.
A journalist with significant experience in covering mental health issues, Kissinger not only tells a true story of mental illness in the family but also identifies how difficult it can be to access needed resources.
