Behind the Wall: The True Story of Mental Illness as Told by Parents

By all accounts, having a mental disorder is tortuous and being the parent of a mentally ill individual is just as onerous. Yet, in spite if the millions of mentally ill children in the United States alone, the travails of both mentally ill children and their parents are frequently misunderstood. This work seeks to remove such confusion; it contains a collection of stories told by parents of mentally ill children. They relate the hardships of raising their child, managing their family, balancing their time, and providing continued care for their ill child into adulthood.

This book is difficult to recommend for numerous reasons; for one, although it provides insight into the hardships of mentally ill children and their parents, it is written almost entirely in the form of interviews, which tend to swiftly fade into repetitive griping. The book would supply useful information to those who are struggling with mentally ill children themselves, but little advice or hope is provided to these potential readers, and is never provided in context of the interviews. Overall, the book’s concept is an excellent one, but it lacks direction.