From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them. Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it. While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies. Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss. A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books.
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For years, Meg Kissinger had the mental health beat pretty much to herself. For the readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she turned out one incredible story after another about the ordinary people who suffered from mental illness and addiction—and from the failure of health care institutions and local and state government to care for them. She wrote occasionally about her own family too. Now, in this gripping and poignant memoir, she has put it all together, telling the big-picture story of this country’s catastrophic inability to create anything resembling a mental health system and the impact that those failings and a ruthless illness had on her own family. If you want to understand mental health in America, this is required reading.
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Rob Waters, Founding Editor of MindSiteNews