Helping Someone with Mental Illness: A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers
Helping Someone with Mental Illness: A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers
- ISBN13: 9780812928983
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The first thing you need to know is that life isn’t over. “The good news,” writes Mrs. Carter in Helping Someone with Mental Illness, “is that with proper diagnosis and treatment, the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness can now lead productive lives.” Based on Mrs. Carter’s twenty-five years of advocacy and the latest data from the Rosalynn Carter Symposia for Mental Illness, her book offers step-by-step information on what to do after the diagnosis: seeking the best treatment; evaluating health-care providers; managing workplace, financial, and legal matters.
Mrs. Carter addresses the latest breakthroughs in understanding, research, and treatment of schizophrenia, depression, manic depression, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mental disorders. She also discusses the emotional and psychological issues in caregiving for people with mental illness and offers concrete suggestions to help erase the prejudice and discrimination based on misinformation about mental illness. Her book is also a rich clearinghouse that guides readers to hundreds of specialized resources, including organizations, hot lines, newsletters, videos, books, websites, and more.Rosalynn Carter’s “Helping Someone with Mental Illness” is a powerful tool that anyone–families, social workers, doctors, consumers–can put to good use. There are other such books on the shelf, such as Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual, but Carter’s is by far the best. She has managed to weave the deeply moving stories of many individuals into a cleanly organized discussion of every salient issue: diagnosis, treatment, scientific research, stigma, advocacy. Her descriptions of the different mental illnesses–schizophrenia, depression, manic-depression or bipolar illness, and the anxiety disorders–are particularly cogent, and her 20-page list of references is alone worth the price of the book.
Carter never sugarcoats a hard truth or omits a painful statistic, but somehow her voice–warmly personal but also respectfully reserved–comes through so strongly that it is almost as if she is in the room with the reader. Coauthor Susan K. Golant, whom Carter thanks for her organizational skills–among other things–has done her work in a particularly unobtrusive way. This is much more than a book; it is a companion.
Reading Carter on mental illness is like reading Dr. Spock on child care. Having advocated for the mentally ill for most of her adult life, she is an acknowledged expert by now, and she writes with the authority one might expect. But her special status as a mother also subtly informs her text. Discussing caregiver burnout, she writes, “Having dinner at 6:00 p.m. each evening, going to church every Sunday, or watching a favorite TV show every day are all simple ways of maintaining a sense of control. Routines can create structure and a feeling of safety.” Readers will be particularly grateful for Carter’s constant, explicit suggestions for beating the stigma that often surrounds mental illness. Perhaps no book can be perfect–Carter writes little about post- traumatic stress disorder, a common affliction–but Helping Someone with Mental Illness comes very, very close. –Peggy Moorman
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mkm@aristotle.net Kay Morgan said,
Wrote on May 5, 2011 @ 6:11 am
facing the difficult challenge,
An excellent resource for family members and friends who wish to help a person with mental illness. I especially appreciated the book’s emphasis on biological *and* social risk factors for various forms of mental illness.
The section on building resiliancy in children at risk for mental illness is reason alone to purchase this book. It is a wise, compassionate, humane treatus on a very important topic.
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|Heather Marshall Negahdar "Haze" said,
Wrote on May 5, 2011 @ 6:22 am
A caring and compassionate work,
The former First Lady’s book is a very compassionate effort which can help a person who has to deal with mental illness for the first time no matter what the setting. Mrs. Carter gives a good over-view of the “whole picture” concerning all mental illness with enough detail to give the reader a good foundation in the subject. I think the really profound thing that I read in every line of the book was the real sincerity that Mrs. Carter has for her work. She really is serious about changing the way some in society look at individuals with mental illesses. I applaud her for her work and her book.
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|Anonymous said,
Wrote on May 5, 2011 @ 7:00 am
Very Educational,
This was one book I did not hesitate to buy as I know so many people with the mental illnesses.
I must applaud Rosalyn Carter one of the former First Ladies for her help in understanding Mental Illness and for trying her utmost not to see it as a stigma in this twenty first century……but for us to learn that getting help is the priority here.
From Depression to Panic attacks……Paranoia to Schizophrenia, caregiving with lots of love and understanding can go a long way. Buy this book to assist you if not now, sometime in the Autumn-time when friends and love ones will be taken under that dark umbrella. The treatments for each mental illness is remarkable.Thank you Roslyn Carter with help from Susan K. Golnat for a book that’s going to help millions.
Congratulations.
Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 26/10/01)
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