Thanks to the efforts of Joan and Leo Gambadoro, I spent a wonderful morning in Chandler, Arizona with “Caring Connections“, a NAMI-sponsored group of parents with adult children with mental illnesses.

Focused on creating balance in our lives, we talked specifically about balance and equilibrium between:

- care-giving & self-care

- care-giving & nurturing our primary relationships

- family obligations & personal respect

- focusing on illness & focusing on living well

- unfulfilled expectations & real possibilities

- fighting for change & accepting ‘what is’

- desires & reality

- judgement & understanding

- recognizing personal limits & achieving full potential

It is vital that caregivers fulfill their own emotional, spiritual, physical and social needs so that they’re better able to support the people relying on them.

Good self-care is the basis of good care giving.

Group members asked lots of questions, shared valuable information, and uplifted me tremendously. What a pleasure to spend time with people so actively engaged in making a positive difference in the world!

Blessings to them all!

…If you belong to a group that would benefit from my appearance, please contact me. We’ll work it out.

Larry Cox from The Tucson Citizen wrote this review of Mommy I’m Still in Here:

“Kate McLaughlin, a Tucsonan and member of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance and the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation, knows firsthand what bipolar disorder can do to a family. Two of her three children, now young adults, were diagnosed with bipolar disorder during adolescence. Her candid, courageous and uplifting book is an account of suffering, helplessness, grief, guilt, and eventually, acceptance. She wrote the book as a way to heal herself and millions of others, parents and children alike, who are confronted with this illness.”

Mommy I’m Still in Here chronicles the toll and emotional turmoil as experienced from the point of view of a frustrated, guilt-plagued parent. After making peace with her children’s illness, she set about accepting them as they are. As she explains, bipolar disorder is a factor in the genetic mix that makes her children unique individuals.”

Many thanks, Larry Cox!

Bloggers…if you haven’t yet read Mommy I’m Still in Here, I hope you soon do.

The University of Virginia adopted a policy to notify a student’s parents if the student is determined to have a mental illness and if it is determined that there is a “substantial likelihood” in the near future that the student is a danger to himself or herself, or others. The one exception would be if a physician or clinical psychologist determines that contacting a student’s parents would cause harm, either to the student or another person. The university’s policy comes near the anniversary of the killings of 32 Virginia Tech students by a student with mental health problems.

“The diseases of the mind are more and more destructive than those of the body.”

–Marcus Tullius Cicero

A great orator, writer and philosopher who lived and died a hundred years before the birth of Christ, M. Tullius Cicero was often accused of shifting his thoughts and opinions and of being inconsistent.Was his profound understanding of living with mental illness based on personal experience?