Missing Father: A Daughter's Search for Love, Self-Acceptance, and a Parent Lost in the World of Mental Illness

MISSING FATHER: A Daughter's Search for Love, Self-Acceptance, and a Parent Lost in the World of Mental Illness At once a powerful story of a daughter's literal and figurative search for her father and an indictment of the mental health system with legacies to this day, Missing Father will touch readers searching to make sense of the complexities of love, family and self-understanding. Filled with searing memories and beautiful, poetic writing, it captures the extraordinary character of a bipolar parent as seen through the eyes of a bewildered little girl who grows up to become a family therapist with children of her own. While it is memoir, it reads like first-rate literature in a vein with classics such as A Beautiful Mind and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Missing Father cuts through the layers of shame, alienation, and ups and downs of life in a family navigating through mental illness and will resonate with anyone who has tried to understand or reach an inaccessible loved one. It will deeply affect those who have lived through a traumatic childhood and doubted they could survive; and anyone who has had to be a parent to their parent. It is must reading for those concerned with drug company and mental health system abuses; those who work in mental health as a therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers or nurses; and who work in facilities such as board and care, assisted living and programs for the chronically mentally ill.