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 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.
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