'While You Were Out' by Meg Kissinger
Two years before the publication of Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out, I told her I knew how difficult it was to write, but it would be her crowning achievement in a journalism career filled with important achievements.
That last part is certainly true. Meg’s stunning and important book about her family’s devastation from mental illness is getting the national acclaim it richly deserves.
But I’m still embarrassed about the first part of that sentence. As a friend, I thought I knew quite a bit about what Meg, her parents and seven other siblings went through as mental illness ravaged their family like a contagious disease. I didn’t have a clue.
In a way, that’s a tribute to Meg as well. All her friends will tell you she’s one of the funniest, most high-spirited people we know. Irreverent humor developed as a necessary survival mechanism in her family from a very early age.
Public Health Failure
A sense of the absurd is also required to describe a public health care system that treats mental illness more like a crime than a deadly disease destroying its victims and their families.
Mental illness isn’t really contagious, but it might as well be. It profoundly affects the lives of every family member and not everyone survives. The fight for their lives primarily takes place out of sight. You can’t cross the street to avoid the mentally ill in Meg’s compelling personal story about her own family. They’re the family next door in every neighborhood.
On the cover, her publisher suggests “the era of silence” in the 1970s was responsible for the inadequate treatment and support for families like the Kissingers experiencing mental illness. Well, what’s been our excuse ever since?
If the era of silence surrounding mental illness ended in 1980, nobody ever told that to the mentally ill, their families or journalists like Meg who have continued to expose the failures of our public health system ever since.
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MAGA Hostility
In fact, the enthusiastic reviews and national audience for While You Were Out couldn’t come at a more crucial time to protect victims of mental illness from an even more supercharged era of hostility toward the mentally ill from rightwing politicians.
Every time Trumped-up MAGA Republicans find themselves on the losing side of national political debates over racial justice, abortion rights or marriage equality, they try to create a distraction by launching an attack on another vulnerable group of Americans.
Right now, rightwing extremists can’t deny that mass murder is becoming commonplace in our nation because military assault weapons designed to kill hundreds of people at once are openly sold to anyone who wants one. That’s why they want to change the subject from banning the weapon designed to commit mass murder to the mental illness of mass murderers.
No one would argue mass human slaughter is a rational act. But the truth is very few people suffering from mental illness ever harm anyone other than themselves. Overwhelmingly, the only lives they have ever taken are their own. Although as Meg makes clear, they do lasting damage to the families they leave behind and everyone else who loves them as well.
But the reason why the largest facilities for the mentally ill in most major cities are public jails isn’t because they commit crimes of violence. It’s because they’re considered a public nuisance and people don’t want them around.
Needless to say, incarceration and poor training for the guards in such facilities can increase the paranoia and delusions of mental illness, often with deadly consequences. Meg saw it happen with the deterioration of her youngest brother, once one of the other funny, charming kids in the family.
Love and Understanding
She is still haunted by the last letter Danny wrote to her apologizing for his behavior. Her brother had become a media cliché—a privileged suburban teenager who committed a stupid kid crime. A misdemeanor that could have led to probation irrationally escalated into a long-running battle to prove his non-existent innocence and got him jailed.
“Only love and understanding can conquer this disease,” Danny wrote, saying people should understand his bipolar illness was a sickness, not a choice. Meg recognized the message for the suicide note it was. She called her dad who was living with Danny and was assured he was fine. The next day Danny killed himself.
Meg admits using Danny’s line about love and understanding as her battle cry. She’s written stories about all the families next door isolated from society and suffering from the cruel disease that shattered her family.
There was plenty of love and a growing understanding of mental illness among the eight Kissinger children who banded together to try to save their own lives. It wasn’t enough. Millions of families just like them need a lot more of it from all the rest of us.
