When Someone You Love Has a Mental Illness

This book contains what so many mental health books lack: advice. The majority of books on mental health offer a medical or personal description of various mental health conditions. This book tells someone who loves or cares for a mentally ill friend or relative how to help and handle them.

It covers the basics of how to approach and talk to someone who may not be behaving or thinking rationally at the time, to how to work with insurance companies and locate help.

I have purchased dozens of books in my quest to help a loved one. While the majority have been useful, this is the one I wish I read first. If you need help understanding and working with mental illness, this book is a great starting point.

This book is excellent for people with relatives or friends who have severe mental illnesses, requiring occasional (or frequent) hospitalization and so on. It is a good resource in that it gives advice and tips for coping with various situations that absoultely will come up when you have a relationship with a mentally ill person. It is practical, there is no hypothesizing about what causes what, no blaming the family, very little "psychobabble." It's almost a how-to manual. It offers some insight into what the mentally ill person experiences, which is helpful to the family who may be frustrated and overwhelmed and very tired of trying to understand.

But it does not offer much for spouses in a relationship with a person with mental illness. Nor does it extend easily to the family and friends of somebody who has a mental illness or brain disorder who is as functional as the "average" person most of the time, but has frequent, incapacitating mood and perceptual problems.

If your loved one has a mental illness which is not so severe as to require hospitalization freqently, or a large degree of psychiatric intervention, this book will provide you with soem understanding, but not as much practical help as it will for people facing more severe problems.

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This book is wonderful. If you are dealing with a family member who has a mental illness (particularly severe schizophrenia), you will find answers and helpful advice throughout this book. The first few chapters provide insight into the illness and it's especially readable because Woolis doesn't get overly medical. She provides enough information for you to understand about the illness and why your relative may have it. The book is chock-full of useful advice, and we have tried many of her suggestions (with success) already. She walks you through ways to talk to your family member during `episodes,` how to get them to perform basic tasks, how to ask them to take meds, and so on. There is advice for almost every situation. And, the best part is that Woolis treats the illness with respect, and encourages us to do the same throughout the entire book. I really felt that her advice is from the heart, and meant to help us. There is a section on how we need to focus on ourselves too, and that was particularly helpful. The book is very user-friendly, and can be read cover to cover or in sections. Many of the sections answer the questions most family members have, and offer concrete and realistic ways in which to handle the bizarre requests and behaviors that accompany mental illness. Everyone in our family has a copy that gets a lot of use. Highly recommended.

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When my son was disgnosed with a mental illness I started to look for books and literature that help me to understand what was going on, and how could I deal with it. Also, to learn about what to expect in terms of behaviors that I haven't seen in him yet, etc. I found several books that were very good in terms of describing mental illness from the medical point of view, but none of them would say much about the patients as people interacting with relatives or friends. In addtion to that, is common to find description of very extreme and severe cases whose profile may not necessarily match yours. This book is easy-to-read and its content is excellent. It has all the practical information you need to know, and you need to be aware of. Even though it doesn't not go very in depth, the information provided comes from a valid and experienced source who has work and done research about mental illness, so things are explained along with the "reason why" they happened that way and not in other, and why they fit in the profile of mental illness. This book helps people to learn the best ways to deal, act and react to a person who suffers from it in a way that both, patient and family, can reduce the stress and find harmony living together. EXCELLENT

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This book was extremely helpful to our family. Make sure you get a copy of the 2003 revised edition. I was first sent one that had the older edition (with 232 pages) even though the cover said, "revised and expanded". The revised edition has 308 pages. Amazon/B & N, or the publisher will send you a new one if you return it. The book is well worth reading. It has so much practical advise. We are now able to talk with our son again, which we've hardly been able to do since he got sick.

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