While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

by Meg Kissinger

no one explained why Nancy tried to kill herself this time. Nor did they ask if we had any questions. We were left to try to figure that out on our own. Once again, I was afraid to talk about what had happened, worried that if I asked too many questions, I might upset my parents even more.

Growing up with so many unexplained and unexplored traumas—an emotionally distant mother who leaves mysteriously, a physically abusive father who drinks too much, a knife-wielding sister—I’d learned how to block out what I didn’t want to think or hear or see. When you put on blinders, it becomes easy to create your own reality, to blur fact with fiction. You sharpen the focus to only a few pixels so that you can’t see the whole picture. You start to wonder if something really happened or if you were making it up. After a while, I couldn’t trust myself to know the difference.

But our family’s shorthand way of dealing with these situations—by simply not discussing them or making light of it—had an insidious way of fueling shame and blame where none was warranted.

We claim to have a mental health system in this country. But that’s not true. A system is defined as a “set of things working together,” and, as I saw through my reporting and as a family member, very few things work together to help people with mental illness. More than one-third of all people with serious mental illness don’t get treatment.

the scandal of how millions of America’s most vulnerable people are being abandoned by the very institutions designed to protect them. Government agencies, police, schools, the insurance industry, hospitals and health care providers, even religious organizations, all turn a blind eye to so much of the suffering.