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

by Meg Kissinger

I don’t think he meant to hurt us. He just didn’t know how not to.

If we acted like we were having fun, maybe it would come true.

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.

Yet this kind of prejudice and discrimination is allowed to fester because the aggrieved are either too embarrassed to speak up or we choose to ignore them.

For every person with severe mental illness, there are dozens of others whose lives are upended by their disease.

It was easier to gaslight me than own up to their own reckless acts.

“It’s not always easy to look past the label of someone’s illness to see the person they are inside,” I told the crowd in church that afternoon. “If you could do that with Georgia, you were in for a treat. She was one of the smartest, funniest, and most generous people around. I loved her.”

Despite the way they are often portrayed in popular culture, people with severe mental illness are rarely dangerous. In fact, they are more likely to be a victim of a violent crime than to cause one.

some people who are too sick to realize that they are ill can be a danger to themselves or others and need someplace safe to stay until they are better. As uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge that, it’s equally irresponsible to ignore.

the crude disposal of my mother’s family belongings felt like another kick in the gut, like the things we valued were little more than garbage.

you can’t fast-forward through grief or read a CliffsNotes version of your life and expect to make peace with it.

I’d never paused to understand what it must have been like for my mother to raise all those kids more or less on her own, with her own paralyzing bouts of depression and anxiety and a husband who often was absent, drunk, or out of control.

If I was going to move on, I’d need to find a way to forgive my mother, just as she had forgiven me for my many faults and misdeeds over the years.

“In steering me back to that time, I have been forced to look at the girl I was then and, knowing what I do about myself now, be able to reframe and understand why I did this,”

It’s okay to be disappointed, but don’t get discouraged. I