A Powerful Book

Day 2

I finished listening to a powerful book today, The Price of Silence: A Mom's Perspective on Mental Illness by Liza Long.  I listened to it instead of reading it because... I have to admit... I don't like reading non-fiction or biographies/memoirs (I do like listening to them though).  Long goes into detail about the love, joy, struggles, disappointments, fear, etc of dealing with a child with mental illness.  I have limited experience with mental illness.  I did have one student years ago with a mental illness and I remember experiencing the same emotions Long so elegantly described in her book.  I can not begin to image the stress and struggles of being a parent of a child with mental illness, it was stressful enough just to be the teacher.  

Long brought many aspect of mental illness to my attention.  For example the first line of defense for the mentally ill is law enforcement.  Really? Law enforcement is the first line of defense?  In America, with as educated & advanced as we are, why haven't we come up with a better plan than calling the police to get a mentally ill person help?  Long also speaks about the stigmatism of mental illness, how the stigma is worse than the mental illness.  She also wondered why we are not educating this population of students better than we are.  She did not bash teachers but she did question education.  My answer to her would simply  be we are not taught how to deal with mentally ill students.  In my experience I was told about the student, given some suggestion on how to work with the student, given the paperwork then figured the rest out on my own.  Teachers need better/more training in this area.

I did nothing but talk about this compelling book during lunch today.  Maybe writing here will get some of it out of my system.  There's nothing I like better than a book that vividly sticks with you for months!  This is one of those books.