Mentally Ill Mothers

How does it feel to have a mom who is mentally ill?

How does it feel to have a mom who in a psychotic break tries to kidnap your teenage sister? Who when released from the mental hospital throws away her medication? Who threatens and physically assaults her children? Who accuses her family of poisoning her?

What is that like?

Read this book and find out.

What do you do with 30 garbage bags of empty liquor bottles in your mom's apartment? How do you make sure your alcoholic mom gets her diabetes medicine while she's in jail for a DUI?

Read this book and find out.

Cary Tennis did not start out in life intending to be an advice columnist. Things just sort of turned out that way. But after 10 years and over 1500 columns for Salon.com, he's learned more about life than any writer has a right to learn.

One thing he's learned is that no matter what you're going through, somebody else has been through it before. No matter how crazy you think your situation is, there is help available.

Maybe your mom lives with mice, or tried to smother you with a pillow, or has filled her house with junk four feet deep. This book is about people who have lived through that and more. These are real people who grew up in towns and cities just like yours, who had moms and dads who look just like yours. But something went wrong and they had to learn quickly how to cope with the unimaginable. So they wrote to Cary Tennis at Salon.com.

These are his answers.