I am posting the link to an interview my 19-year-old daughter and I gave on the radio. It aired yesterday. I checked to make sure it was OK with CC for me to post it. Now you will all know my name!
In the hour-long interview, we discuss our family’s experiences with mental illness. I wish I had said more, but the hour flew by so quickly! I’m putting it in the Parents Forum since it’s so common for young adults to suffer from some type of mental health disorder.
If any of you have kids with a mental illness diagnosis and would like advice or just somebody to vent to, please send me a PM. You’re not alone!!
“Mental Illness—a Maine Family’s Story. Teresa Price, a North Yarmouth mother, joins me in the studio along with her daughter Katy.
Their family appeared to have it all: Teresa and her husband had a solid business and successful kids when the world they knew collapsed around them: all three children were diagnosed with serious mental health disorders. How they meet with the challenge every day, how they cope and how they manage to have hope…”
I listened, too! I’m so impressed with you and your daughter, your eloquence and compassion in getting the story of your experience out there to help others. I wish all of you the very best.
Just finished listening- I’ve always appreciated your posts @MaineLonghorn - I’ve learned so much from you sharing your family’s story. You are a wonderful person for wanting to help families going through similar circumstances. Bless you!
And your daughter sounds like a lovely young woman.
Thanks for the link. What a difference sharing experiences can make to others facing similar challenges. You and your daughter are compelling voices on this topic. Best to your family.
As a parent who has experience with dealing with serious medical and psychiatric issues, I was dismayed by this interview. You were not in control of the content, so not on you. But I feel this interview might contribute to stigma rather than help. It just makes your kids “other” and “otherness” is the basis for more prejudice. It also treats the situation as tragic.
It was nice to hear what your sons and daughter are doing, finally, but there was really no description of treatment, the hope provided by meds, the gifts that remain or even balance illness, and the emphasis was on onset not outcome. (The interviewer seemed obsessed with overachievement, which is not a cause for brain-based disorders but her constant mentioning of this issue would seem to imply the opposite.)
It is a tricky thing to balance recognition of illness without basing identity on it.
Sometimes the grief state leads to advocacy prematurely. That is all I am going to say on that.
@compmom , Though there wasn’t a description of the treatment and could not be a detailed one in a such a short interview, the message that I personally got was that mental illness can happen in any family and that there is treatment available to help manage it, with very specific, repeated instructions on where one might go to get help and support.
I also noticed MaineLonghorn seemed to want to discuss the help they got from a provider but the interviewer cut her off.
It was strange and misleading how interviewer kept bringing up overachievers, like she has some kind of issue if her own with that. Totally agree on that.
I did not get a sense that this piece perpetrated the idea of “otherness”, rather the opposite. And I tend to believe best way to make long-term change with regard to the perception of the “otherness” of mental illness is to get the word out, with our first responsibility being families who are dealing with this is the trenches and feeling alone or even ostracized.
Besides talking about it to inform people, I don’t know how to address the “otherness” issue. I’m still surprised at how people don’t understand or “believe in” ADHD or specialists who don’t recognize “high-functioning autism” in girls and women. :-t
