Chapter 10, Families Suffer and Learn Summary and Analysis

Having a child with manic depressive illness often means giving up dreams of retirement and travel. The writer chronicles the struggle of one woman who became aware that something was wrong with her daughter when the daughter was in high school. The woman's husband refused to face the fact that something was wrong with their daughter until she went away to college and suffered her first psychotic mania. The daughter was first to return home, finish school at a local university, and to live with her parents. The daughter's illness is managed with medication, but she will never be able to live on her own, putting stress on her parent's marriage, ending her mother's dreams of traveling with her husband, and forcing her mother to worry about what will happen to the daughter...