Loving Someone with a Serious Mental Illness: Caring for Your Loved One and Yourself on the Journey to Mental Health Recovery

Powerful and practical tools to help you support your loved one with serious mental illness, while also making room for your own needs.

If you have a loved one--a spouse, adult child, or other family member--who has a mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression and is experiencing symptoms like psychosis, you need help right now. Delusions and hearing voices can be frightening. Mania can be unpredictable. Isolation and withdrawal can make things worse. Things are made even more challenging when your loved one is resistant to treatment. You may feel helpless watching them struggle. And you may question whether you can handle the myriad everyday practical and emotional challenges ahead. It’s important to know that you are not alone.

Authors Katherine Ponte and Izzy Goncalves have been there. They are there. During Katherine’s ongoing eighteen-year recovery from severe bipolar disorder and depression, her husband Izzy has been her primary caregiver. Together through trial, trauma, and triumph, they have amassed an unmatched store of lived experiences, shared perspectives, and lessons learned. They now bravely share, for the first time, everything they have come to understand about the challenges they’ve faced and surmounted together.

A vital resource for families combating mental illness, this book will help you:

• Recognize the signs and symptoms of mental illness
• Maintain and improve communication between you and your loved one
• Better understand your loved one’s feelings and emotions
• Handle special situations, including de-escalating an emergency
• Discover different options for treatment
• Make room for self-care

The book never forgets one crucial truth: you have needs, too. That’s why the authors provide resources to ensure that you stay healthy, well-rested, and energized, so you can help your loved one on the path to recovery.

Katherine Ponte is a mental health advocate, writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of ForLikeMinds, an online peer support community for people living with or supporting someone with mental illness. She is a faculty member with the program for recovery and community health at Yale University School of Medicine, and sits on the board of National Alliance on Mental Illness in New York, NY. She is the author of ForLikeMinds: Mental Illness Recovery Insights. Katherine is happily living in recovery from severe bipolar I disorder with psychosis and extended periods of suicidal depression after an 18-year struggle.

Izzy Goncalves works in finance and has been the primary caregiver for his spouse, Katherine. He has been instrumental in helping her develop several mental illness recovery initiatives.