By Gail Griffith; 320 pages. From the book jacket: "A memoir with a social conscience, this book not only examines one family's struggle to overcome depression and an attempted suicide, it lays bare the social, political, and economic challenges that American families face in combating this most mysterious and stigmatized of illnesses."
Not a feel-good book about overcoming tragedy, this is more of a feel-uneasy book about managed care, psychiatric uncertainty, and the mysterious workings of the teenage mind.
- Absorbing story of a family in crisis
- Useful reading for parents of teenagers, troubled or not
- Inclusion of Will's girlfriend, Megan, in story brings practice of cutting to light
- Points up need for better insurance coverage for mental illness
- No magical psychiatrist ties up all Will's loose ends for a happy ending
- Reprints of family letters and journal entries sometimes feel like padding
- Despite endless analysis and some first-person contribution, Will remains an enigma
- Megan's story does seem to tie up a little neatly
- Lacks details on the therapeutic program Will goes through
- Just one perspective on a story that probably has many differing points of view
- Chapter 1: The Bears Downstairs
- Chapter 2: Pulled from the Wreckage
- Chapter 3: Tunnel Vision
- Chapter 4: Like Mother, Like Son
- Chapter 5: Lethal Secrets
- Chapter 6: Broken Hearts, Deep Wounds
- Chapter 7: Lost Horizon Ranch
- Chapter 8: California Rocket Fuel
- Chapter 9: Calamity and Clarity
- Chapter 10: Time, Sweet Time
Epilogue: In Will's Own Words
Armchair psychiatrists will have an easy time second-guessing all the reasons why the young protagonist of this true family story tried to take his life. We all want to spot the reasons why things like this happen to other people and not to us, and it can be reassuring to click pieces like divorce and remarriages and relocations and school changes and relationships and genes and dangerous meds and unhelpful doctors and mistake-making parents into place and say, "See? That's why it's not my kid." But it's a lesson of this book that kids are good at hiding their troubles and parents are good at wanting to believe. An estimated 3.5 million teens in the U.S. suffer from depression, as many as 90 percent of them undiagnosed, and 2,000 teens attempt suicide daily, without the kind of warnings you get from hindsight. How many of those parents also thought, "Not my kid"?
Griffith certainly did, despite her own personal experience with depression, and her family's tale offers valuable lessons. Like, when you've weathered one crisis with your teen and are starting to think, "Wow, that was bad, but things are going to be okay now," it's probably a good time to start locking up the meds and sharp objects. If your kid looks alright and sounds alright and says, "I'm alright," that doesn't necessarily mean he's alright. That makes parenting a fairly terrifying proposition, filled with paranoia and hypervigilance and unpopular decisions. But we knew that already, right?
