As someone who grew exhausted and was eventually physically endangered by a loved one with mental illness, I am compelled to say that the daughter did the right thing by avoiding contact with her unfortunate father. Living around someone so afflicted is a life of walking on eggshells, and in the end, the only way out of the chaos is to leave. This might sound cruel, dispassionate, or not dutiful to many, but a life with someone like this is exhausting and takes a huge toll on one's health and peace of mind. The decision to leave is very painful, but in the end, each of us is responsible for watching out for our own health and well-being first.

This is a moving story--I will try to see the film when it is shown on Wednesday. I recognize the mental illness symptoms of the father as much as I can also feel the emotional confict the daughter has in avoiding him. As the writer above said: being around someone like this is exhausting. Although treatment helps a bit, it doesn't do nearly enough to return the person to anything like normal functioning.

This is, indeed, a moving testimony to the tenacity of the illness and the struggles that occur for the individual and those around them. Children seldom have the internal or external resources to cope with the chaos that periods of decompensation produce and it is essential that there be adults around for their protection and mentoring. As we age and get a more experienced perspective, it is easier to manage our responses to familiy members with illness though there is always a part of us that remembers 'the way things were before' and grieves for it periodically. Interestingly enough, when the person with the illness is able to differentiate between their pre and post onset states they often intensely grieve the losses they have experienced. Unfortunately, suicide is not uncommon for people in this situation, and, though they may disagree with the choice, many can understand the reasoning behind the action. KG

Stories like this are nothing new. Demagogues like those at the Treatment Advocacy Center have always existed in one form or another. They aim to get people who they consider troublesome out of the way, so they use gruesome stories of some horrific incidents to whip up public hysteria against a whole large group. They want to make it easier to take away the civil rights of people who they disapprove of by forcing them into something they call "treatment", but they aren't interested in what happens to these people after they are forced into this treatment. They say to trust them that it's all for the best, but it isn't really.

A new family group that accepts no funding of any type from the drug industry.

This is not spam the Psychiatric Medication Awareness Group (PMAG), http://www.psychmedaware.org/video.html is clearly concerned about the over medicating of Canada and is informing the public in British Colombia and may soon spread across the continent in Canada.

Psychiatric Medication Awareness Group
http://www.psychmedaware.org/index.html

Psychiatric Medication Awareness Group (PMAG) is a small group of British Columbia citizens concerned about the increasing use of psychiatric drugs in B.C. and Canada, and the potential harm associated with these drugs. PMAG is also concerned about the dramatic increase in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to the general population in Canada, particularly to women. This massive health crisis has been largely ignored, and its social and human costs are inadequately researched and largely unquantified.