Families Learn to Live With Mental Illness

By Joe Kennedy joe.kennedy@roanoke.com 981-3256

FERRUM — Polly Boone’s family suspected something was amiss when she requested a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for Christmas a few years ago.

She was a teenager whose behavior didn’t always add up despite her good grades and goal of becoming a surgeon.

A counselor dissuaded Polly from insisting on the book, though she didn’t really need it to confirm her schizo-affective disorder – - she already had a pretty good idea of what it was.

Now, at 23, she has found medications that keep her stable for the most part. She has graduated from Virginia Western Community College, lives independently and works part time.

Her revised goal is to become a sociologist who works with mentally ill patients in a hospital setting.

The road from where she was to where she is has been hard for her and her family. Coping with the serious mental illness of a close relative may be no easier than coping with a family member’s serious physical illness.

That’s partly because of a lingering reluctance to speak publicly about such matters and partly because the average person doesn’t know much about mental illness until confronted with it.

Useful information

Beginning Thursday, Aug. 30, two Franklin County residents will offer a free, 12-session education program called Family to Family.

It will take place once a week from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the Carilion Family Medicine building in Rocky Mount.

The curriculum will provide a comprehensive background about mental illness, coping and communications skills, self-care and other areas of interest to relatives, close friends and caretakers of mentally ill people.

Polly Boone’s mother, Emily Boone; sister Sara Peters; and family friend Donna Austin have taken training to teach the course, offered by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

All belong to NAMI’s Franklin County chapter. None is a mental health professional, but all have relatives diagnosed with a mental illness.

Progress possible

On Thursday, the four women sat in the living room of the Boones’ Franklin County home and described the fear, ignorance and struggles that can accompany an initial diagnosis of mental illness.

The symptoms of schizo-affective disorder may include major depression, a mixed or manic episode and other symptoms.

The program will cover other diagnoses such as borderline personality and bipolar disorders, anxiety, panic and obsessive- compulsive disorders and schizophrenia. Polly spoke about her half- dozen hospitalizations, including two weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore and the many anti-psychotic drugs her doctors prescribed before finding one that worked.

“Truthfully, none of the drugs work for everybody,” said Sara Peters.

Even lithium, which many people assume to be highly effective for mood disorders, does not work for many. Polly said it rendered her “a zombie.”

Drugs that do work may carry significant side effects. Polly’s medications have caused her body weight to double, she said. But she accepts that so she can function better mentally and emotionally.

“Now things aren’t hunky-dory,” she said, “and it helps to have my family support me.”

Her family always tried, but did not understand mental illness. They thought the next visit to the doctor would provide relief.

It seldom works that way.

Emily Boone said that she and her husband blamed themselves for their younger daughter’s illness and wondered what they’d done wrong.

Sara Peters said her sister’s symptoms were “so scary they made me so angry. This was something I couldn’t just fix.”

Now they hope to help others say to their relatives with mental illness, “Look, this is not your fault, this is a problem and here are some ways” to cope with it.

The quality of the women’s lives has improved as their knowledge of mental illness has grown.

So has their acceptance of the situation.

The weekly program will have a capacity of 25.

For information or to register, call Emily Boone at 483-4541 or Sara Peters at 483-4962.

Joe Kennedy’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.

(c) 2007 Roanoke Times & World News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.