One of eight children, Meg Kissinger grew up in Chicagoland at the “height of the baby boom.” Three members of her family attempted suicide—two successfully; five, including both parents, had a serious mental illness. Kissinger worked for many years as an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, exposing the failings of our nation’s mental healthcare system. But of late, she has trained her attention more on norms than policy. In her new book, While You Were Out, Kissinger explores how families respond to mental illness and criticizes the once-pervasive culture of “silence” around it. She also argues for a more therapeutic culture in America.
Mental illness within the family context is a rich subject. Think: Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road (2020), Miriam Feldman’s He Came in With it (2020), Ron Powers’s No One Cares about Crazy People (2017), and Pete Earley’s Crazy (2006). There are two main reasons for this richness.
First, mental illness tends to concentrate in certain families. That’s per folk wisdom and academic research. For the general adult population in America, the rate of serious mental illness runs at around 5 percent; in clan Kissinger, it ran at 50 percent. Members of such families anxiously scrutinize all low moods for signs of major depression and sometimes wonder whether they “might be doomed by our genetics.” Before their wedding, Kissinger’s mother warned her father that she had been receiving mental health treatment and indicated that she would understand if he therefore wanted to back out.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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