Surrounded by Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness and Family Secrets - Softcover

The book trailer video for Surrounded By Madness may be viewed by clicking the link to my Amazon author page in the More About The Author section below or by searching for "Surrounded By Madness" on YouTube.
More than 11.4 million people in the U.S. experience a mental illness severe enough to cause problems in their daily lives. For every person experiencing a serious mental illness there are family members who suffer as well.  As a child I watched my mother struggle with manic depression. As a mother, I fought beside my adopted daughter, diagnosed with ADHD, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. For years, stigma and shame made me keep my mother's and my daughter's illnesses secret.  When my 18-year-old daughter stopped her treatments and ran away with a heroin addict, I knew there was nothing I could do to help her. In my grief, I started writing our story.   Hoping to learn from the experiences of others, I read dozens of memoirs written by people with mental illness and memoirs written by the parents and children of people with mental illness. Each memoir told the same story: turmoil, more turmoil, and then a happy ending. Sometimes the person with mental illness had extensive and expensive contact with the healthcare system, care well beyond the grasp of most people. Other times the recovery was so unbelievable I wondered whether a serious mental illness had really been evident.   I tried to reconcile the stories these memoirs told with the facts that I, a psychologist, knew about mental illness. Where were the memoirs written by people like me? People whose loved ones were homeless, in jail, or dead? Surely I wasn't alone.  It was then that I realized I needed to tell my story so that other families struggling with mental illness would understand they are not alone and that hiding mental illness is destructive.  Surrounded By Madness is the product of a 3-year journey. I worked with a writing coach who helped me understand narrative arc and an editor who helped polish my writing. The comments of my several rounds of early readers helped me learn how to tell my story.  I hope reading Surrounded By Madness encourages families struggling with mental illness to tell their stories and that it helps people who have not had direct contact with mental illness to understand the challenges mental illness presents to family members.  

Acclaim for Rachel Pruchno's SURROUNDED BY MADNESS

"An important, poignant voice rooted in one family's experience.  Will help move communities beyond dialogue to action."
Michael J. Fitzpatrick, M.S.W.
Executive Director
National Alliance on Mental Illness

"A heart rendering but honest story ... [that] will help others avoid the self-blame and diminish the heartbreak that severe mental illness can impose."
Peter V. Rabins, M.D., M.P.H.
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Co-author of The 36 Hour Day

"Reading Surrounded By Madness is like watching the inevitable train crash that you can't stop from happening. Poignant, vivid, tragic, yet ultimately resilient."
Stephen P. Hinshaw, Ph.D.
Professor, Dept. of Psychology - University of California at Berkeley
Vice-Chair for Psychology, Dept. of Psychiatry - University of California at San Francisco

"Dramatic insights into the plight of families. Humanizes a difficult problem. A must read."
Gerald N. Grob, Ph.D.
Henry E. Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine Emeritus
Rutgers University Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research

"A report from the front lines of the daily battles of mental illness and a first-hand account of loss, this is a compelling book for clinicians, scholars, and family members trying to understand chronic mental illness."
Michael A. Smyer, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology & Provost
Bucknell University

"Honest and heartbreaking and sure to initiate important conversations about mental illness - the first step toward reducing stigma." 
Christine Ferri, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey