WP: A Family's Painful Journey

[MountainLaurel]

About trying to find help for a mentally ill child:

Dawn Rieck sat at the dining room table in her split-level house at Andrews Air Force Base, chain-smoking. She wore a distant yet acute expression, as if she were trying to read the wind. She was listening to her daughter play.

At that moment, her middle child, Jessica Marie Caughlin, 11, was not beating her 4-year-old brother or killing her big sister's hamster or cutting the goldfish in two. She was not threatening to stab her mother. The knives were all locked in the garage.

With this child, however, her mother is always anticipating the next disaster.

It's like that for many parents who are raising children with serious mental illness. With nerves and budgets, jobs and marriages regularly strained, they are consumed in the struggle to care for their children. Some say they need help that neither private insurance nor the public health system comes close to covering.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11073-2005Mar29.html

[Mairead]

1. All such families as this should have permanent community-paid support

It was chance that wrecked Jessica's ability to maintain self-control (but 'bipolar disorder' sounds quite far off the mark, to me), so the burden should be distributed across the entire society, not loaded onto her mother's shoulders.

Otherwise, what the hell is society good for?