Living with Mental Illness

Do you wonder what it must be like (or is like), to be the parent of a child with mental illness?

A good start will be to read Lisa Long's article titled "I am Adam Lanza's Mother". You'll find it on Huffington Post.

Then read Susan Resko's article titled "I REFUSE to be Adam Lanza's Mother". You'll find this one on the website of the Balanced Mind Foundation, which is located in the Chicago Loop.

Have you found yourself in the middle of police calls involving your child, in the midst of your child's emergency psychiatric hospitalizations, constant medication changes for your child, less-than-understanding social workers and doctors, people with mental health degrees who don't understand mental health?

Just yesterday a lawyer asked me why a court would listen to me, a person without a degree in the mental health field, instead of blindly accepting an evaluation by a person with a Psy. D. degree?

Why? Because I've known the kid for 16 years and know him far better than this "doctor" (psychologist) who interviewed him for 2½ hours and whose seven-page evaluation contains many errors and omissions. I have written a six-page critique of the evaluation and now find myself in a song-and-dance routine with the "system" to get it read.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who understands mental illness. He too does not have a degree in a mental health field. But he understands, as I do, that you do not overload a person (man, woman or child) with a long task list. You give him one or two things to do, and then you watch to see how he does them. If he can't complete them, you dig in to understand why, and then you make adjustments.

You don't give him two more things to do, on top of the two unfinished tasks. And when he hasn't done those four, you don't give him two-three more things to do. All you are doing is setting him up for failure, when what you should be doing is setting him up to experience success.

That's the class that too many professionals missed!