Meg Kissinger, WHILE YOU WERE OUT: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
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[0:33]Meg Kissinger is the author of While You Are Out, an intimate family portrait of mental illness
[0:38]in an era of silence.
[0:40]Meg is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author.
[0:43]She will help you see and think about people with mental illness in a new light.
[0:46]Her engaging memoir, While You Were Out, has been praised for its incisive reporting,
[0:51]boundless compassion, and surprising humor.
[0:53]It was named Editor's Choice by The New York Times, The LA Times, Amazon,
[0:57]Goodreads, and Independent Booksellers Association.
[1:00]Audible chose it as the best of the year.
[1:03]Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country
[1:06]to report on her nation's failed mental health system
[1:09]winning dozens of national awards.
[1:11]She is a popular speaker at universities, civic organizations, and corporate events.
[1:15]Kissinger taught investigative reporting at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism,
[1:20]and is a trainer for the school's Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism.
[1:24]Kissinger lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, along the shores of Lake Michigan,
[1:27]her favorite place to plunge, even on the coldest day in January.
[1:31]Welcome, Meg.
[1:32]Thanks so much for coming on Momstone of Time to Read books to discuss
[1:35]while You Are Out, an intimate family portrait of mental illness in an era of silence.
[1:40]Congratulations.
[1:41]Thank you so much, great to be here.
[1:43]As I was just saying, I was so happy you reached out about this book.
[1:47]I've now recommended this book.
[1:49]My colleague was reading this book anyway.
[1:51]Really powerful.
[1:52]Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your story and how it became important?
[1:57]Yeah, it's a lulu, so that's always the toughest part is to get right to the meat of it,
[2:03]because there's a lot of stuff goes down in this book, so it's ostensibly a book about my family,
[2:11]which is I'm the fourth of eight kids and we came from a family that was full of love and joy,
[2:17]but also a lot of mental illness.
[2:20]Unfortunately for us, we were growing up in an era in a time when we didn't talk about that,
[2:25]so I was born in 1957, so we were right in the heart of the baby boom, and all kinds of
[2:32]mayhem ensued, sad things, but also a lot of fun stuff.
[2:38]But the point in my writing this book was to show that two things can be true.
[2:44]You can have a family that is marred by mental illness, but it can also be a place of great
[2:50]love and comfort and support, and I think that's surprising.
[2:55]I think people wouldn't figure that both of those things can happen at once.
[2:59]Well, you do a great job.
[3:01]The way you portray each character is with compassion and multifaceted.
[3:08]The humor and the pain, and it's hard to pull that off.
[3:15]Made it a little easier because you're a hilarious people, and so
[3:18]lucky to come from a wacky tribe.
[3:21]You have a passage, it's later in the book, but you ask this question.
[3:26]You say, when should a person's right to autonomy yield to their safety or the safety of others?
[3:32]These are not easy questions to answer if there are any answers at all.
[3:36]I knew this story would be fraught with controversy, but there was no avoiding it.
[3:40]My job was to write about the mental health system.
[3:42]This is the third rail of mental health debates, so highly charged that you risk getting
[3:47]zapped by just touching it. It made me angry to hear gun rights advocates overstate the problem
[3:52]as they pushed for easier commitment laws over stricter gun measures.
[3:55]I was equally annoyed by mental health advocates who criticized any stories about
[4:00]dangerousness as reinforcing stereotypes, but it was my duty as a journalist to explore the issue.
[4:06]Right. Talk to me about that and your role as a journalist.
[4:11]Right. So not surprisingly, I was a newspaper reporter for many years,
[4:18]40 to be specific, but not surprisingly, many of my stories involved
[4:24]the mental health system and really our country's failure in providing adequate care for people
[4:29]who suffer with mental illness. I came about that, of course, in the most natural of ways,
[4:35]because I'd seen this firsthand in my own house with my brothers and sisters and my parents,
[4:41]and so I'd seen how really what awful or any treatment, a lack of any treatment.
[4:46]So I was very curious about that, and it was a lot easier to ask strangers these very pointed
[4:53]questions about what it's like to have mental illness, what it's like to not be able to get relief
[4:59]or care from that. And so that's really my focus, especially for the last 25 years of my
[5:05]time as a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was writing about just that, our nation's failure.
[5:12]But the toughest question of all is how do you get people into care if they don't have insight
[5:19]into their own illness? And I have great understanding of what's the right word. I agree that
[5:26]it used to be way too easy to lock somebody up. So it used to be on the signature of a
[5:32]husband or a wife or a neighbor, and you get three people and sign a petition and boom,
[5:38]off they go behind a locked door, sometimes they never to be seen again. And that's not right.
[5:43]People with mental illness have civil rights. But the flip side of that was also true that we, in
[5:48]our zeal, to close down all these asylums, again, many with good reason. But a lot of that was
[5:56]also motivated by saving money. So where do people who are very seriously ill ending up? And in
[6:04]no good place, on the streets, in jails and prisons, they're not getting the kind of custodial
[6:10]or treatment and care that they need. So there's not an easy answer to that, unfortunately.
[6:17]And that tension is always there. And a lot of people fall through the cracks of that tension.
[6:23]Big interesting questions to tackle. Can you tell listeners a little bit more about your family
[6:31]and the way specifically that mental illness found its way into your home? Sure. So on the fourth
[6:36]of eight kids, there were five girls and three boys. And we were born in a liquidy split fashion,
[6:42]you know, so very typical, again, of the baby boom, especially in an Irish Catholic house.
[6:47]So my parents got married in 1952. And by 1964, they had eight kids. So that is kind of staggering.
[6:56]It's actually really funny seeing the beginning of the book where my mom, you know, the pill comes out
[7:01]and she's so excited. And she goes to, but then the Pope says, you can't put birth control. And my
[7:07]mother's like, can I say shit on the podcast? Well, whatever. She says a naughty word and finds her
[7:13]way to the confessional to seek a dispensation. Anyway, she had a lot of kids. And she was really
[7:19]in no, but then then she got everyone in the town to line up. Right. Well, that's the
[7:24]point. What kind of the whole thing is that she does finally finagle this dispensation from the priest,
[7:31]this young associate. And she, you know, says very planatively, you know, I've done enough
[7:36]propagate the faith father. Anyway, he gives her the dispensation. And the next Saturday, the phone rings
[7:42]and its father Welsh. And he wants to speak to my mother. He doesn't sound too happy. I answered
[7:46]the phone just by happenstance. Anyway, my mother gets on the horn. And he says to her gene,
[7:52]what goes on in the confessional is private both ways because that day, the next Saturday,
[7:57]the line for his confessional was around the block. And my mother, you know, spilled the beans to
[8:03]all of her friends who were equally as desperate to go on the pill. Anyway, she, you know,
[8:09]bless her heart. She was a loving, wonderful, soulful, right woman. But she really had no
[8:15]business having eight kids in 12 years. And she didn't have the resources for it. I mean,
[8:20]happily we had the financial wherewithal. My dad had a good job. But she had no mother. She had no
[8:25]sisters. She had baseline anxiety and depression. Again, words that we didn't speak in those days
[8:33]because we didn't talk like that. We didn't identify people didn't speak like that back in
[8:39]in those days. Anyway, I come downstairs for breakfast one morning and six years old,
[8:43]looking for my mom in a bowl of cream a week. And she's nowhere to be found. And nobody will tell
[8:49]me where the heck she is. So I later learned many years later. She was hospitalized, you know, for
[8:56]what was probably postpartum depression. But again, these were words that we didn't speak. And
[9:03]so I remember my father's mother, my crazy Irish grandmother following me, you know, I said,
[9:10]well, what will I tell the nuns at school? I was trying to figure out where my mother was.
[9:14]And she said, just tell them she's got pneumonia. Tell the nuns she's got pneumonia. So that was
[9:19]the first time I really realized, whew, some screwy is going on here. You know, there's something,
[9:25]something not right in in our house. And then one by one, you know, people, brothers and sisters
[9:32]of mine began to present with their own forms of mental illness, some very severe. And,
[9:39]you know, I'm not ruining any secrets to tell you that two of us, two of the, of the eight kids,
[9:45]ended up dying by suicide. So, you know, took a great toll on our family and, you know, all of
[9:51]us suffered in one way or another. And so that's, you know, again, it sounds like such a grim
[9:58]story, but our family.
[10:00]is one that has remarkably stayed together,
[10:04]and we're there for each other now,
[10:07]in ways that I don't see too often.
[10:11]And so that was the story I wanted to tell,
[10:12]was a story of resilience, not in a cheesy way.
[10:16]I mean, we still all are banged up,
[10:18]but how do you move forward
[10:21]when you're so saddled with all these illnesses?
[10:25]Well, I am so sorry for the losses in your family,
[10:29]and what the consequences of all of that.
[10:32]So thank you for sharing it with everybody else.
[10:36]Well, sure, thank you.
[10:37]You know, it was to be so many people live with this.
[10:40]It's just, it's remarkable.
[10:42]This book came out in September,
[10:43]and I probably get without exaggeration,
[10:47]four or five emails or forms of communication,
[10:51]you know, Instagram, Facebook, whatever,
[10:53]the only thing I haven't gotten is like smoke signals
[10:56]or phlegans, I'll probably get those like next week.
[10:59]But anyway, I get,
[11:01]if people are reaching out to say,
[11:03]I thought you're ready about my family,
[11:04]you know, this is so prevalent.
[11:08]And unfortunately, so is suicide.
[11:10]So we need to start talking about this
[11:13]in much more candid ways and much clearer ways.
[11:18]And that's what this book is meant to do
[11:20]is to kind of bear witness and to offer people
[11:24]a chance to tell their story to.
[11:27]Yeah, absolutely.
[11:28]I had a close friend die by suicide in high school.
[11:32]Well, we were, she was my good friend from high school,
[11:34]but it didn't happen till we were out of college.
[11:36]But I think about all the time, like, where could I have,
[11:41]not that it was up to me, of course.
[11:43]I'm just one small player in all of the characters,
[11:45]but what could any of us do differently?
[11:48]Like, I'm still in touch with her mom regularly.
[11:50]And I don't know, where would she be now?
[11:52]And, you know, it's very hard not to go down that path.
[11:55]It's such a heartache.
[11:56]You know, I see my brother and sister's friends all the time.
[12:00]Well, for this book, I reached out to them.
[12:02]You know, I wanted to really remember them.
[12:04]I sister died many years ago in 1978.
[12:08]That's a long, long time ago.
[12:10]And then remember the Danny died in 1997.
[12:13]But, you know, I had to conjure them.
[12:15]I had to, like, bring them back to life on the page.
[12:18]And that was tough to do.
[12:20]So I really, because, you know, your inclination, it's so sad,
[12:24]you just kind of sweep it out of your mind as best you can.
[12:27]But then that's too bad too, because you love them,
[12:30]and you want to hold them close and remember them.
[12:33]So it's really tough.
[12:35]You know, I think a death by suicide is especially tough
[12:38]to kind of, you know, hold that person with you still.
[12:42]And so I will run into, you know, their old buddies,
[12:45]their old running mates.
[12:47]And I reached out for the purpose of this book.
[12:49]I even found some of my sister's old high school boyfriends
[12:52]that we used to call one of them was the hugger
[12:54]and the other was the kisser.
[12:57]So I found the hugger and the kisser.
[12:59]And they told me stories about my sister
[13:01]and the car and the Camaro at the lakefront.
[13:04]And he went like, whoa, stop there.
[13:05]We don't need to know.
[13:06]We don't need to go into all these details.
[13:08]But it was really fun.
[13:10]It was fun to kind of be back with them again.
[13:13]But sad too, you know, because you do,
[13:16]you wonder what could I have done?
[13:18]And, you know, I think especially in the case
[13:20]of my sister Nancy, I was four years younger than she.
[13:23]And we used to scrap, you know, we used to fight.
[13:27]And I would seal our clothes.
[13:28]And I was like the bratty little sister.
[13:31]So you feel not a small measure of guilt.
[13:34]And I'm not the one that caused her to take her own life.
[13:37]I know that.
[13:38]But it's just kind of a natural question.
[13:41]Well, how did it feel for you to turn your journalistic eye
[13:45]on something so personal and on your family?
[13:48]Like was that a challenge?
[13:50]Was it what it feel like?
[13:52]Yeah, it was very intense.
[13:54]So and I knew it would be, and I kind of wanted it
[13:57]to be in a ways because, you know, again,
[14:00]by never talking about these,
[14:02]especially Nancy's death, it just got pushed down
[14:06]and pushed to the side.
[14:06]So just a little orientation.
[14:08]The night that Nancy died in June of 1978,
[14:12]my father called us all into the living room.
[14:15]And he said, you know, in no uncertain terms,
[14:17]if anybody asks, this was an accident.
[14:20]And the reason he said that was that he was afraid
[14:24]that we would not be able to have a funeral mass,
[14:27]you know, a Catholic service for Nancy.
[14:30]And she wouldn't be able to be buried in the Catholic
[14:32]cemetery blot because the Catholic Church
[14:35]had a very awful draconian view of suicide
[14:40]in which they vilified the person who died
[14:43]and considered them to be, you know,
[14:45]a mortal center separated from God.
[14:48]So anyway, that was not a unnatural fear on my dad's part,
[14:52]but what it did for us as kids was to scare the hell out of us,
[14:56]you know, and it made us feel very ashamed.
[14:59]So the shame of her death led us, you know,
[15:03]scattered into corners, not talking about it.
[15:06]And nothing good comes of unresolved grief.
[15:09]So, you know, down the road as we all are beginning
[15:12]to present with our own forms of mental illness,
[15:15]and especially my younger brother, Danny,
[15:17]you know, again, not having a way to talk about it
[15:20]or never having really resolved it
[15:23]or gone through any kind of group therapy.
[15:26]Just unbelievable to me that we would never really sit down
[15:29]as a family and discuss the suicide death of our sister.
[15:33]But that kind of set the table
[15:35]or, you know, related the groundwork for, I think,
[15:38]you know, what happened then to my brother, Danny,
[15:40]and how he didn't have the coping skills.
[15:42]So the journalist and me, you know, the person
[15:44]that spent 25 years writing about the crappy mental health system
[15:48]wanted to turn the reporter's notebook, you know,
[15:50]back on our family and slow walk people through
[15:54]and say, how did this all happen?
[15:57]And what lessons can we learn, you know,
[16:00]in the same way that we do for the George Floyd,
[16:04]beating the shooting, the beating death of him,
[16:06]the 9-11, any kind of tragedy or calamity,
[16:11]you go back and reverse engineer, you know,
[16:14]as we call it in investigative reporting,
[16:16]we reverse engineer.
[16:18]So that's what I wanted to do.
[16:20]So I knew I had to go and get the police records,
[16:23]get the medical files, do all these interviews,
[16:28]and really do the diligence and the kind of building
[16:30]of a story in the same way that I did
[16:33]with my investigations for the newspaper.
[16:35]And so in order to do that,
[16:36]I really wanted to get by in from my surviving siblings,
[16:41]you know, because it's their family too
[16:43]and their tragedy.
[16:45]And so just lucky for me, they're wonderful people.
[16:48]And so I, you know, I had my fingers crossed
[16:50]when I went to them and said, you know,
[16:52]what do you think, should we do this?
[16:53]Let's, I want to do this story about our family,
[16:57]but I don't want to ruin my relationship with you.
[17:01]I'm not willing to throw you under the bus
[17:03]for the sake of me writing this book.
[17:06]So happily for me, they all signed on.
[17:09]Wow.
[17:11]Well, aside from people sharing some of their own experiences,
[17:14]what, what, what have been some of the main benefits
[17:18]you've gotten from doing this project?
[17:20]Well, you know, I know you're not supposed to write a book
[17:23]as therapy because just go to a damn therapist,
[17:26]which I finally did, you know, at the tender age of 64,
[17:29]I found that in the butt and a chair,
[17:31]can you even believe that's to be?
[17:33]I mean, really, that's ridiculous.
[17:35]No.
[17:37]Oh my God, I was too scared.
[17:38]I did go one time as I recall in the book.
[17:42]This is in, I was in my 40s.
[17:45]Anyway, I just, my best friend said to me,
[17:47]you have to go see somebody.
[17:49]Anyway, I did.
[17:51]And then I got so scared when she said,
[17:52]well, tell me about your family.
[17:54]And I started, as I started to tell her, you know,
[17:56]she was like her eyes got bigger and bigger.
[17:58]And I thought she was gonna like reach for the button
[18:00]under the desk and the guys would come in
[18:02]with a big net, take me off.
[18:05]Anyway, I never went, and she said,
[18:06]let's, let's have you come back, you know,
[18:08]every week, like for the rest of your life.
[18:10]This is my, my, let me get with my calendar.
[18:13]Anyway, I never called her back.
[18:14]I was too scared.
[18:15]But then when I was putting this book together,
[18:17]I thought, okay, now we're getting down, down and dirty.
[18:21]Like I have to really, I need some scaffolding here.
[18:26]I need help from a professional.
[18:28]So I, anyway, so I do have a therapist.
[18:31]So I don't need to write a book in order
[18:32]to exercise my therapy.
[18:35]I don't do it help, I have to, and you know,
[18:37]I think it not only helped me,
[18:39]but it helped my siblings too.
[18:41]It helped my brothers and sisters
[18:43]to give a narrative arc or a shape to the chaos
[18:49]of growing up in a, you know,
[18:51]in a family with so much mental illness,
[18:53]in a time when that wasn't discussed.
[18:56]And it was just a big blob.
[18:58]But now here it is, concrete on the page.
[19:01]There's a, you know, a timeframe that kind of makes sense.
[19:05]So it's, in that way it was very liberating.
[19:09]And, and another benefit,
[19:11]this is something that I worried about
[19:13]as I was putting this, starting to write this book.
[19:16]You know, I kind of made my mother,
[19:21]like I glorified her.
[19:23]She died young.
[19:24]And I think when people die young,
[19:25]you tend to, you know, make them a little bit more of a saint.
[19:28]My dad always said, you know,
[19:29]the halo goes on tighter.
[19:31]Anyway, I was worried that I was gonna draw my mom
[19:34]as a one-dimensional character as like saintly.
[19:37]And I learned through the course of writing this book.
[19:39]She was far from a saint.
[19:41]She's made some big-time mistakes.
[19:44]And one that took me, like I had to drink many bottles
[19:48]of sangria and dynamic for a long, long time to process.
[19:53]So I learned some stuff about my mother
[19:55]in the course of writing this book
[19:57]that really rattled me.
[20:00]Halo came flying off. But at the end, when I'm rapping it all up, I really come to this much
[20:07]deeper and fuller understanding of her in a, in a much, in a much more mature and, as I said,
[20:15]fuller way. And at the end of the day, I ended up loving her even more. So that was great.
[20:22]I was good to get the, get the skeletons out, right? Learn the whole, the whole story,
[20:30]parents, people. Well, I'm sure your therapist appreciated the, the massive head start you got
[20:35]on, on the work with the books. Yeah, she was very helpful for me. Do you have plans for more
[20:42]books or where are you going with your journalism and all of that? What's coming next for you?
[20:48]Well, this one kicked my butt. Yeah, I am getting so many calls and people reaching out
[20:56]wanting to talk about the book, which is fantastic. You know, this is exactly why I wrote it. So,
[21:01]and I, I am saying no to nobody. I mean, if your dog has a book group and want to talk to that dog,
[21:08]I just, this is, I wrote it to talk about it. So I've got a big old bag of throat last inches and
[21:13]lots of tea with honey. And I'm just out and about all the time talking about this book.
[21:19]I don't know if I have another book in me. I only have one family. I mean, I now have kids in my
[21:23]own and now grandkids, but they can write their own memoir about me, but I do want them to wait
[21:28]until I'm dead. But I have no, you know, immediate plans, but you know, never say never because, um,
[21:35]who knows? Yeah. Um, is there anything in particular that writing the book made you miss even more
[21:43]about your siblings? Yeah. Yeah. So my sister Nancy was, they were both hilarious, really funny people
[21:50]and, you know, when they were good, they were very good. So I missed, you know, hanging out with her.
[21:56]I also missed. I really came to realize what a little shit I was as a sister to her in our high
[22:04]school days. You know, well, I was four years younger. So we were never in high school at the same time,
[22:08]but you know, when I was stealing her clothes and stuff, and I wish that I'd had the opportunity
[22:13]to let her know that I'm so sorry that she was suffering, you know, like I just thought she was a
[22:19]pain in the neck, which she was, but she was also suffering. So, you know, I wish that I the old lady
[22:26]version of me wishes that I could tell her. That's why I hope there's a heaven. There's probably
[22:32]not a heaven, although, you know, I hope there is, but anyway, whatever, whenever's next,
[22:37]if I get to see her again, I do want to say, I'm sorry that I stole your sweaters,
[22:41]you were a good person, and I love you, you know, and did all for my brother Danny, I'm sorry
[22:46]that we didn't protect you better. So yeah, the book allowed me the opportunity to frame those
[22:55]thoughts. And judging from, you know, comments that I'm getting from readers,
[23:01]they're identifying with that a lot, even if they, especially those who have had people die by
[23:06]suicide in their family, but just living with people with mental illness, which is not easy,
[23:12]that I don't mean to soft pedal, like it is a burden to live with depression or anxiety or whatever
[23:19]form of serious mental illness you have. And that's why we need to, we really need to love those
[23:26]people a lot more. So the week before my brother, my brother, Danny died, he wrote me a letter
[23:33]talking about how he did have mental illness. It was something that he had never admitted to
[23:37]previously. And so this was a confession of sorts for him. And he said it caused him to do and
[23:44]say awkward things. And he ended the letter by saying, you know, love and understanding
[23:51]is what we need to conquer this. And it sounded so cheesy to me at the time, but after he died,
[23:56]you know, I saw that he was right, but that's what we need to do. We need to love people who
[24:01]suffer from mental illness and try and understand them as best we can. So that's my, that's my
[24:08]that's my mantra. And that's why I think this book helps people to do. Amazing. Meg, thank you so
[24:14]much. Thanks for coming on for talking about your book, for sharing your family secrets, if you
[24:19]will, and all the things that that make your family who it was and that make you all the vehicle
[24:27]for helping so many others. Wonderful. So be thank you. And thanks for all you do. You are wonderful.
[24:33]Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't have time to read
[24:40]books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at moms don't have time to read
[24:45]books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club
[24:50]and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at
[24:55]Textures Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing
[24:59]this fantastic intro and outro music.