How Children Experience Parent's Mental Illness

Three Authors Honored By NAMI

(July 5, 2003) Three new books provide important new perspectives on the experience of children of parents with mental illnesses in confronting challenges at different stages of life.

Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is a story for children about a young girl who learns how to cope with difficult moments in her mother’s struggle with bipolar disorder. The book will be released in September 2003. The book is written by best-selling author and National Public Radio Morning Edition commentator, Bebe Moore Campbell.

The other two books are Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman and Nature Lessons: A Novel by Lynette Brasfield.

Holman and Brasfield draw on their childhood experiences as daughters of mothers with schizophrenia to explore similar themes—but with intriguing differences.

Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst is a memoir of her mother’s untreated schizophrenia. One year after Patty Hearst was kidnapped and robbed a bank in 1974, Holman writes, “my mother lost her mind and kidnapped my sister and me to our family cottage” in rural, coastal Virginia, because she believed that they had been inducted into a secret army and were “trusted with setting up a

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field hospital. We lived in that cottage for over three years.” Holman’s book also explores the ways that the legal and clinical system during the 1970s and 80s prevented her family from getting her mother the treatment that she desperately needed. Holman has written for Redbook, Self, DoubleTake, USA Today, and the Washington Post. A portion of Rescuing Patty Hearst received a Pushcart Prize in 2001.

In Brasfield’s novel, Nature Lessons: A Novel, a woman returns to South Africa after 20 years to search for her missing mother and truths about her family history under apartheid. It explores the strain in family and social relationships that arise from paranoia that can be rooted in mental illness or an oppressive political regime. In June, Booksense 76 selected it for its list of Outstanding New Fiction for July and August 2003, considered by independent booksellers to be “unique and provocative.” Booklist has described the novel as “gripping…part mystery, part dark comedy, part harsh political reality.”

Both books show how psychotic delusions reflect a person’s surrounding culture; how what is "real" and what is "paranoid" may be confused, or depend on a person’s class or racial perspective; and the impact that each may have on a child’s past, present, and future.

Brasfield, Campbell and Holman were recently honored at The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) convention.

Click to buy:

• Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry
• Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad
• Nature Lessons: A Novel

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