Dear Reader

 

If you share your life in some capacity with a person suffering from a mental illness, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, you are well aware of the associated lacks, such as compassion, empathy, coping skills, personality inconsistencies, inhibitions, and self-absorption tendencies. You also know how easily we become entangled, manipulated and distracted from our own necessary affairs to serve the perceived need, emergency, and or breakdown of a loved one.

 

Your life is like that of a coal miner, going deeper into the dark uninviting shaft of brokenness and discovering inconceivable levels of volcanic eruptions, emptiness, and heartache. My goal in writing this short book is not to explore the layers of our pain, loneliness, disbelief, and stigma associated with the social and emotional turmoil; which alienates families and relationships in every life situation, my ultimate purpose is to bring hope, strength, and encouragement to all.

 

I have written this book to serve as a handbook, ever at the ready, to inform, educate and even at some point entertain you the reader and fellow caregiver, sufferer, advocate, parent, wife, mother, sister, brother, husband, father, friend. In many ways, those with this disease are victims of heredity, traumatic occurrences, drug, alcohol abuse including, neglect, institutional, physical, mental, sexual, emotional, ignorance, social/racial economic abuses.