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

by Meg Kissinger

Only love and understanding can conquer this disease. As far as I was concerned, Danny summed up everything you need to know in those eight little words. If you love someone, you will try to understand them. You won’t turn away.

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.

A person with serious mental illness is ten times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. Jails and prisons have become the nation’s de facto mental health hospital system.

More than a quarter of the nation’s 559,000 homeless have a serious mental illness. Their average life span is ten to twenty years shorter than the general population.

Two decades later, Jimmy Carter did his best to restore enthusiasm for reform, championing the passage of a 1980 bill that provided federal grants to community mental health centers. But when Ronald Reagan won the presidential election later that year with the promise of getting the federal government off our backs, his first act was to push for a repeal of the bill, which Congress did.

Without adequate treatment options in the community, patients cycle in and out of the emergency room at alarming rates. Data I got from open records requests showed that one of every three people who were brought to the psychiatric hospital for emergency care were released and returned within ninety days.

I had been haunted by a study that found that nearly half of all people who survived a suicide attempt made their decision within the previous ten minutes, and most were glad that their attempt had failed.

The more time I took to consider the trauma we had all been through, the easier I understood that two seemingly contradictory truths can exist simultaneously. My parents could be warm and loving but also reckless and flawed. Our family life could have been happy despite the tragedies.

Just 4 percent of the world’s health research funding was spent on mental illnesses from 2015 to 2019,

The suicide rate in the United States is up more than 35 percent since 1997,