: Larry Hayes
: Mental Illness and Your Town 37 Ways for Communities to Help and Heal
: Loving Healing Press
: 9781615998937
: 1
: CHF 6.00
:
: Sonstiges
: English
: 188
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

A Blueprint for Community Action From Award-Winning Journalist Larry Hayes
Written with authority and compassion, this is the book that rescues mental illness from the shadows and takes the disability into the community.
Learn how each person can play a role to help those who so often suffer alone. Hear the stories of the people who've found how to triumph over this disability. Discover how everyone can work together to create a treatment revolution that enriches and saves lives. Let this guide open your heart and mind to be inspired and challenged to do the work ahead.
A Book that will Change Your Community!
'Larry Hayes provides families with a real self-help manual that is personal and compassionate, yet practical and hands-on. It is long overdue and can only come from someone who has been there--in the trenches. Larry certainly has.'
--Stephen C. McCaffrey, President, Mental Health America of Indiana
'With a father's wit and a reporter's well-honed writing skills, Larry Hayes uses his family's story to offer practical suggestions about how communities can help persons with mental illnesses recover and thrive. This is a wonderful blueprint that spells out ways to change lives and help persons seldom seen or heard.'
--Pete Earley, author,CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
'Larry Hayes demonstrates in this book a very rare gift that he has, the ability to reduce complex social problems to simple terms. In addition, he fills the book with practical solutions and ways to reduce the somet-imes debilitating effects of mental illness.'
--James C. Howell, Ph.D., juvenile justice researcher

Part I
The Faces


Just as mental illness comes in various diagnoses, it shows up in different kinds of people, at different stages of their lives.



1. Start with Mother and Child


Let me say at the outset that mothers don't cause mental illness. That myth was dispelled long ago. But a mother can foster lifelong mental health. That's tough to do when she's depressed.

In the early months, no doubt Wanda was.

I didn't know it as post-partum depression. Was there such a term in 1965? But I can still see her sad face as I'd walk through the door in our Shirley Place apartment in Cincinnati's western hills. She might still be in her housecoat, strawberry blonde hair not combed. She seemed so frustrated, so inadequate with this baby who had no interest in taking naps during the day. The child seemed happy. The mother wasn't.

I tried to be sympathetic. But in truth, I didn't know how to help her.

Wanda, who died in 1997, was my first wife. We'd been married about three years when Robyn was born, in October, 1965. I had dropped my plan to be a minister and was doing student teaching in the morning and early afternoon, then typing freight bills at Mason-Dixon Truck Lines during the evenings. So the two of them, mother and child, were stuck together for much of the day.

It's pretty common for a new mother to get the blues. Most snap out of it within a few weeks. But for others, the blues turns into a major depression. Untreated the depression can last for years. It can become a lifetime of battling the disability, with only periodic remissions.

The story doesn't end there. Most of us can readily grasp this. The relationship between mother and child is critical to the child's mental health. It's the early bonding. It's the thousand ways a mother communicates to the child that he or she is wanted and loved without condition. Or, in tragic cases, she fails to communicate all that. Maybe the father's love rescues the child, maybe not.

The mother's mental health could be the most precious gift she can give to her child. If you see a baby who appears depressed, listless, it's not a great leap to assume that the mother has been depressed too. She hasn't been able to engage the child.

When the depressed child becomes a toddler, you're apt to find the child cries more easily than other children. That child is the one who develops sleep problems and might act out. In pre-sc