When Someone You Love Has a Mental Illness: A Handbook for Family, Friends, and Caregivers, Revised and Expanded

This book is wonderful. If you are dealing with a family member who has a mental illness (particularly severe schizophrenia), you will find answers and helpful advice throughout this book. The first few chapters provide insight into the illness and it's especially readable because Woolis doesn't get overly medical. She provides enough information for you to understand about the illness and why your relative may have it. The book is chock-full of useful advice, and we have tried many of her suggestions (with success) already. She walks you through ways to talk to your family member during `episodes,` how to get them to perform basic tasks, how to ask them to take meds, and so on. There is advice for almost every situation. And, the best part is that Woolis treats the illness with respect, and encourages us to do the same throughout the entire book. I really felt that her advice is from the heart, and meant to help us. There is a section on how we need to focus on ourselves too, and that was particularly helpful. The book is very user-friendly, and can be read cover to cover or in sections. Many of the sections answer the questions most family members have, and offer concrete and realistic ways in which to handle the bizarre requests and behaviors that accompany mental illness. Everyone in our family has a copy that gets a lot of use. Highly recommended.

This book contains what so many mental health books lack: advice. The majority of books on mental health offer a medical or personal description of various mental health conditions. This book tells someone who loves or cares for a mentally ill friend or relative how to help and handle them.It covers the basics of how to approach and talk to someone who may not be behaving or thinking rationally at the time, to how to work with insurance companies and locate help.I have purchased dozens of books in my quest to help a loved one. While the majority have been useful, this is the one I wish I read first. If you need help understanding and working with mental illness, this book is a great starting point.

This is not one of the many books on "understanding" [a] serious mental illness. This book is a step-by-step guide to more successful interpersonal relationships between family and patients. No doctor or therapist will ever give you these essential tools, because therapists needn't live a life with your loved one - and may not even know what that life entails in a real and daily way. My daughter is a bipolar patient, diagnosed in 1981. Using this book, I have for the first time negotiated a crisis while knowing what to do and maintaining communication with her throughout the crisis. It is the book I always knew I needed. There is much more to serious mental illness than symptoms and medicine. This is the only book I have found that addresses the "more."

An insightful book about how to interact with a loved-one having mental problems or disorders. Woolis, in a caring way, pulls no punches when describing the pain that family members and the person will experience. But she shows how to go beyond the pain and be helpfull to our loved-one and to others in the circle of family and friends.

Written from a mothers point of view, coping with a child being swallowed by her disease, Ms. Woolis has come through with a compelling portayal of the family and the disease. The other part of the book is a reference that noone dealing with mental illness should miss. It tackles every issue the professionals miss - like dividing up the care responsibilities and coping with the real life routine of day to day illness.