The most difficult part for me as a family member was watching my daughter in so much
pain and being helpless.
It’s like watching your loved one drowning and not being able to go out and help them.
Every mother wants to, every family member, every human being wants to save people that
are in pain and I couldn’t.
It was her pain to go through and I had to just stand and watch.
I started noticing that my daughter was having trouble when she was like two weeks old and
she was a little more anxious than other babies.
She was very particular about who would hold her and she’d cry a lot when a stranger
touched her.
And that’s not really usual with babies that are two weeks old, but she was like that.
We just sort of thought that was just her personality.
We thought that when she was little that she was naturally shy, so we treated her that
way.
She was also very much of a perfectionist and I realized that she was more of a perfectionist
than most children are so we tried to help her through that and make her at ease.
Then when she got to be a teenager she had a full psychotic break.
I was terrified, confused; I honestly did not know what was going on.
It was like a nightmare.
It was a horrible experience for a mother to watch a daughter turn… change so quickly.
When my daughter had her first psychotic break we did what I did for our other family member;
we visited her actually every day.
We learned everything we could about her illness.
We went to a support group at Stanford for family members of people with schizophrenia.
I went to NAMI, National Alliance of Mental Illness, Family to Family class and I learned
how to be a supportive family member and how to take care of myself.
I still can’t help but believe I could do more.
I want to do more.
I want the pain to be gone.
I want her to be healed.
It’s very hard for me to come to the realization that it is her illness and I cannot walk in
her shoes.
I’ve noticed that when my daughter is not feeling well, people don’t talk to me about
it.
It’s like she becomes invisible to others.
So it’s like, she’s in the hospital.
I have some friends who will call and say, “How is she doing?
Is she doing better?
Can we do anything?
Can we bring you meals?
Can we help you out?”
And we’ve also had some people that we know that just will not talk about my daughter.
Even at work, there were other teachers on my staff that would just not say anything
about it.
It was like they were afraid that if they said something that something bad would happen
like she had cancer and they’d get it or something.
Fortunately now there is so much more knowledge about mental illness that where I’m working
people ask me, “Is your daughter doing better?”, when I come to work every day.
And I think, okay, that’s a change.
It’s not the stigma that I had before.
A lot of families in the kind of a situation that we’ve experienced in my family get
torn apart.
There’s a much higher incidence of divorce when you have special needs children like
we did.
I’m gonna say that there were some really rocky times in our marriage because we had
to get it together if we were going to support our daughter.
I think it’s very important when people have family members, loved ones who have mental
health illness; that they take as much care of those loved ones that do not have mental
illness as they do the ones that have the mental illness.
Nobody can tell how much another person is suffering because of diagnoses.
I think families need to be educated.
They need training.
They need to be listened to so that people can recover.
I’ve learned how to be a support group leader.
I am a trainer for Family to Family classes.
Family members come to my classes and learn about illness.
I love to teach those classes and to watch family members learn that they’re not at
fault.
I’m a more self-assured parent now than I was when my daughter first came down with
her illness.
I was so afraid that I’d do something wrong when she first became ill.
Now I have a lot of confidence and I know that I’ve done a lot of things right thanks
to so many people in our church, in our support group, in the NAMI groups, in the Mental Health
Association; in all those groups so many people have really encouraged me and just are constantly
telling me I’m doing a good job and that I am doing right and I’m beginning to believe
it myself.