Fix What You Can

Schizophrenia and a Lawmaker’s Fight for Her Son

De: Mindy Greiling

Narrado por: Laural Merlington

In his early 20s, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate.

Greiling describes challenges shared by many families, ranging from the practical to the heartbreaking. Greiling confronts the reality that some people with serious mental illness may be dangerous and reminds us that medication works - if taken.

The book chronicles her efforts to pass legislation to address problems in the mental health system. It also recounts Greiling's painful memories of her grandmother, who was confined in an institution for 23 years - recollections that strengthen her determination that Jim's treatment be more humane. Written with her son's cooperation, Fix What You Can offers hard-won perspective, practical advice, and useful resources through a brave and personal story that takes the long view of what success means when coping with mental illness.

©2020 Mindy Greiling (P)2020 Tantor

A Must Read for Families

This amazing beautifully written book is the story of so many that have children with mental illness. Mindy depicts the ongoing grief the mothers go through watching their child suffer and the frustration with a mental health system that is overwhelmed and broken. Im grateful to Mindy for her great service in the legislature and for writing this astounding book. It will help so many as it did me.

Thank you for sharing your journey.

Jim should share his story with others who have SMI as it will save lives.

Informative and moving

I chose a five star rating of this book as it is the most informative analysis of the current mental health crisis in the USA that I have read. The author was a lawmaker for many years and stood by her son, who lives with schizophrenia, as he navigated the disastrous pitfalls of the mental healthcare cobweb. The book is worth reading for this personal story as much as for the advocacy one. It’s incredibly moving! An extra feature of the story is that the author’s son also struggles with addiction which interplays with his schizophrenia in a heart-wrenching way.

Masterful mother’s telling of how it is

Every legislator needs to listen to this book and vote to reclassify serious mental illness as a brain disorder in order to fund research for medication that works without side effects. Mindy’s son snipped off his nipples for crying sake! I see parallels in my own situation caregiving my schizophrenic daughter.

Great story but a little preachy at the end.

Great story but the writer gets a little preachy at the end. I would recommend.

Awesome story!

Mindy’s story normalizes the feelings that cross the mind of those that deal with a loved one with this brain disease, schizophrenia. I loved being able to discuss similar episodes with my siblings and parents. It’s so very comforting to learn from the events Mindy’s family took, there’s solid advice in this novel, through all the eventful happenings described. Thank you, Mindy, for sharing! xoxoxoxo

Amazing Book!

This book was very well written. It brought me right into what this family went thru having a son with mental illness. It showed the weaknesses in the system and the need to fight for what you need…no one is there to hand it to you. A mother’s love is very triumphant but exhausting at the same time. A story I know very well.

Misguided, Disempowering, and Horribly Disrespectful

The author of this book seems like a kind woman with genuine intentions and a clear love for her son. However, this is a book sharing the journey of a person with schizophrenia in which the effected person is never allowed to speak on his own behalf. While Mindy's life and experience is no doubt affected in complicated ways by the presence of mental illness in her family, this story is fundamental not hers to tell and co-opting of it drowns out the voices of actual people with mental illness. The audacity of some sections of this book astounds me. Mindy discusses the often severe adverse side effects of antipsychotic medication and concludes that taking such medication is still ultimately better than the symptoms of schizophrenia. This is quite the presumptive statement as Mindy is not the one taking such medication. She has and likely will never experience either these adverse side effects nor symptoms of schizophrenia. Mindy stares that loneliness is the worst part of schizophrenia. However, she once again has no direct experience with the condition or the loneliness it incurs. Mindy is constantly speculating on her son's possible thoughts as opposed to allowing him to simply describe his own experiences. NAMI features prominently in the book's context, yet every individual associated with NAMI is a loved one, never a person with mental illness.

Moreover, in the few instances the perspectives of people with mental illness are expressed, they are often inconsistent with Mindy's portrayal. Jim clearly does not feel his medication is always worth the drawbacks. Jim verbalizes feelings that his autonomy has been routinely undermined. Mindy champions a bill to reform civil commitment legislation that is directly opposed by patient advocate groups.

All of this contributes to a fundamental view of people with mental illness and being unable to reliably advocate for themself. Mindy takes the stance that people with mental illness cannot know what they need, that others around them know better, and that the decisions made by others should override a patient's. The book supports this message with an unflattering portrayal of it's main subject. Every included decision Jim makes is framed as incorrect, deserving of intervention, and ultimately vindicates Mindy's own judgements. Mindy constantly attempts to manipulate and control her son's behavior by leveraging her support against him. She decries any attempt to assert her son's autonomy. She criticizes client-centered treatment philosophy. She chaffs against suggestions from others that she may be interfering with her son's independence. She mocks the idea that "people have the tight to make bad choices.”

Overall the book constantly betray views of her son as a burden who has negatively affected her life. Mindy makes frequent mention of the idea that if her son were not ill, she would be in better position. Mindy frequently refers to her son as dead, in need of fixing, and not truly her son when he's experiencing symptoms. The topics of symptoms is framed not around how they effect her son, but how they will effect her. Mindy fails to maintain the perspective that the person most effected by her son's psychosis is, and will always be, her son. She fails to understand that her son's life and experience are his alone. She fails to understand that his condition is not about her.

However the worst feature of this book to my opinion is the profound disrespect and insult it's author shows to the subject. Mindy puts unnecessary emphasis on her son's unfinished education and career in blue collar work as if it's a disappointment. She repeatedly returns to his childhood substance use as if she blames him for his onset. She often compares her son's achievements to his sister or others. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the weight her son gains. She's remarkably dismissive of the adverse effects her endorsed mental health treatments have on her son, with no consideration given to the experience of being held against his will or enduring long stays in psych wards. Klonopin nearly kills her son and yet she never stops lamenting his inability to take it until he returns to it. Even at age 40, Mindy continually invokes childhood memories and benal habits of her son as if she never stopped viewing him as a child. She states that his niece will never truly know him. There are endless descriptions of Mindy looking enviously at happy families with "normal" children and wishing that were her. The abject pity with which Mindy views her son is infuriating. Ultimately I cannot view this book as anything an insulting degradation of people with mental illness meant to typecast them as incapable and serve a harmful political agend to revoke their autonomy. If you'd like to hear the story of someone with mental illness or learn what kind of support they truly need, you can simply receive your answer from a person with mental illness themself.