Losing Tim

September 1, 2014
Gionfriddo, a nonprofit director and onetime mayor of Middletown, Conn., has written a memoir that makes a strong argument: the public policy around mental illness is in shambles. As he recounts, states failed to replace hospitals with adequate care and treatment options when they defunded their psychiatric hospitals in favor of treating people locally. Tragic consequences followed for mentally ill people, including Gionfriddo’s son, Tim. In grammar school, Tim began to exhibit learning disabilities. He became depressed, was periodically “out of control,” and seemed, to his father, to lack empathy. Middle school saw Tim bring a BB gun to school. Then came alcohol and drug use, theft, auditory hallucinations, and, ultimately, a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Tim attended seven different high schools over four years. Meanwhile, Tim’s parents learned to navigate the worlds of special ed, the law, and medicine. In one of the most shocking episodes of the book, a psychiatrist allows 15-year-old Tim to decide whether he should take 50 mg or 100 mg of Serzone. High school was followed by a swift descent into deeper mental illness, homelessness, and prison. Gionfriddo’s story is powerful, persuasive, and sad.

October 15, 2014

There are two categories of memoirs about schizophrenia: the triumphant first-person account of adversity overcome and the awful, slow descent into permanent madness, as described by the patient's family members--the former is exemplified in Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett's The Quiet Room, the latter in Randye Kaye's Ben Behind His Voices. This title is squarely in the second category and possibly the most gut-wrenching of the bunch since Gionfriddo's (president and CEO, Mental Health America) son Tim is literally lost: his family has been unable to find him after he disappeared into the underworld of the urban homeless. The irony is that Gionfriddo was instrumental in writing legislation that established the current mental health care system in his home state of Connecticut. The book, however, is a purely personal memoir of a parent's attempts to help his son, along with the requisite tales of uncaring bureaucracies, emotional and physical turmoil, and humiliation that is the stuff of such accounts. VERDICT No new ground is covered here, but readers of the recently released The Price of Silence (2014) by Liza Long and Harold Koplewicz may want to follow up with this.--Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA

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