Kirstin’s Story

This book began as a therapeutic exercise for a mother who had recently lost her agoraphobic daughter to suicide. Years later, a visitor to her anxiety disorder information website asked her for material that would help in explaining his daughter's school phobia to her teacher. It was still happening... here was a child who was experiencing the same lack of understanding that had virtually crippled her own child's education in the nineteen eighties. Her father was searching the internet for help. Parents were still having to educate the very people who should have been among the first to recognise the problem; the people who should have access to programs that could potentially prevent it from escalating. She decided to finish telling her child's story. Perhaps it would help; make people aware of childhood anxiety disorders; let desperate parents know they are not alone...

This book began as a therapeutic exercise after the death of the author’s daughter. Some years the manuscript was expanded into a book and published to help parents of children with anxiety disorders recognize what is happening when a child’s behaviour changes and to let them know that they are not alone. After a long career as an advertising copywriter, developer/designer of business communications materials and researcher/editor/ghostwriter of a number of small press non-fiction books, Jean Jardine Miller is now concentrating on writing her own novels, featuring Canadian families and the challenges they face in life. A consistently increasing audience is enjoying the first three, ＂Fate and Angus McGrath＂, ＂Daffodil Dancing＂ and The Family History＂ and she has recently published ＂From Ragged London to the Garden of Eden＂ which follows the lives of a young brother and sister brought to Canada from the East End of London as child immigrants in nineteenth century. Jean lives in Shelburne, a small Ontario town, where she runs the SPCA thrift store, is active in community theatre and hikes regularly on the nearby Niagara Escarpment, staying busy to keep painful memories at bay.