An Interview With Paulette

The 100 Individuals interview series continues with a Q&A with Paulette, who retired from the Board of Education and now works as an adjunct at St. John's University. She has a son, David, and a daughter, Chrissie. Her husband has been gone 13 years. Paulette has been involved with the National Alliance on Mental Illness [NAMI] for the past 11 years. NAMI-Staten Island honored her as a volunteer of the year in 2008.

Today we talked about what it was like when David first got sick, how the Family-to-Family class helped her and can help others in the same boat, and how her daughter responded. The dialogue continues next week with a look at how things turned out and words of advice and comfort for other family members.

CB: Can you tell us about Family-to-Family and why it is of great benefit to people?
P: Yes. Although I've been attending the support group over the years, this is a different approach from a support group. It's set up for a 12-week commitment. Each week we give them handouts. It's an educational support group. We have topics, and the topics range from understanding symptoms-the early symptoms, the active symptoms, the residual symptoms-and we cover schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, borderline personality disorder and OCD. Each week we certainly allow time for lecture, discussion and questions and answers, and for families to share their stories.

We offer practical advice, we do a problem-solving workshop, a communication skills session, we do an empathy class where we stress how one family member's mental illness affects everyone in the family. We bring in our consumers to share their stories and answer many questions; we have our pharmacist come for a medication week. The course gives families what we believe in so strongly: education.

CB: How does that help?
P: The education is for the purpose that they gain confidence in loving, working with and helping their loved ones. We stress that they as caregivers also need help to maintain their balance in life so that they can be strong and healthy: physically healthy, mentally healthy and spiritually healthy. We help them find ways to get their strength and coping techniques. The main thrust from us is to give them knowledge to educate them about ways to work with the system, to talk to the psychiatrist or therapist or any of the wonderful professionals they are dealing with or their loved one is dealing with. We have a crisis file: we help them if they are in crisis to get their loved one into the hospital and how to work with the staff in the hospital, how to set up a discharge plan and how to be sensitive to where their loved one is at while they're recuperating and getting their life back together.

I always tell our family members, "We're with our loved ones 24/7 and we can't wait for the perfect medication or perfect doctor, we have to be the ones to communicate with them in the way that's going to help them the most. Of course we're emotionally involved when mental illness hits our family. We're frightened and worn out and confused, and emotionally hurt also so that makes it hard for us to sit down and have a nice conversation with our loved ones."