Monte had come home from his first prison bid in 2003, and as we learned quickly, frighteningly, there was no infrastructure that existed to help secure either his re-entry or his mental health. Whatever was going to happen would happen because of us, the family, and our capacity to manage severe mental illness. We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police. The brutal memory of Monte’s first break, during which we learned that there were no social services or safety nets for my brother, hung over all of our heads like a
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