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Focused solely on Mental Health reporting. We did so to fill a void, but long before we launched guest today, Meg Kissinger was plowing that ground as one of the only reporters, the country working squarely on the Mental Health beat for 35 years at the milwaukee sentinel, meg covered the workings and mostly the failing of what we euphemistically call the Mental Health system in this. But meg also about those issues on a much more personal as well talk about today her memoir while you were out tells the story of growing up in chicago suburbs with Seven Brothers and sisters, a charming but manic father, a brilliant but melancholic and often absent mother and messy pile of secrets. Welcome, meg. Its great to be with you and talking about amazing work. Thanks, rob. I cant think of anybody i would rather be talking to about it than with you. So its privilege. Thanks much. I have to say, what i love about this book is that you, the keen eye of a reporter the storytelling chops and wit that may be part of the kissinger dna and the passion of someone who has looked squarely at human and institutional failure and wants to expose it. So lets start here. What prompted you to write this book, to dig through and air your familys story and did that flow from your work as . A Mental Health reporter . Yeah, i its always been in me. You know, i as as the fourth of eight kids and as you wisely point out, you know, a boisterous clan. We i was always the nosy one, the monkey in the middle you know, so curious about what was on in my family. And we not talk about it. So that only maybe even more curious and and you know when tragedies befell us they did in spades those you know that piqued my curiosity all the more and i was naturally inclined then to write stories about how people with Mental Illness suffer in this country are not well tended and that that provided me with a pretty lively career for quite a long time. I was very fortunate to work at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which is a regional newspaper with dedicate editors are squarely dedicated to writing about people less fortunate and and gave me all kinds of support terms of, you know, the budget to go places and the time to write these stories in great depth. So i was very for that. But i realized, you know, years and years into this that kind of the the most intense story was the one i never really examined thoroughly. And that was the story of my own family. And if i was going to do that, i would need to do in the same way that i would approach an investigative story. I would write for the newspaper, which was a scary undertaking. You know, it meant that i had to file a freedom of information act request for my brothers, my brother and sisters, police records. I got their medical files. It was a it was a missed mystery waiting to be solved. But it was a very personal and i was more than a little nervous about doing it. Yeah, well, that comes through the digging. Its just an incredible it is an incredible piece of investigative work. And this book, theres a lot of pain in the story of your own family, but theres also a lot of humor, as we just referred to, and and kind of a ferocious by you and your siblings to help and protect each other. And i think maybe the best way. Give a sense of your family and your delicious storytelling would be for you to read a couple of passages from that first chapter of your book. Could you do that for us . Sure, i shall. Thank you so much. So this is very beginning of the book and. Then im going to skip down to the last section of that same first chapter. So it starts out saying, when we were little, my sister patty and i to pretend that ferocious tigers lurked in the space between our twin beds, just waiting to rip us to shreds. They stalks us at night with their sharp fangs growl, yelling and snorting and licking their chops. Geppetto were fingered down to low and snap. Theyd chop it off, clean to the bone. We bounced from one bed to the next, shrieking as we flew through the air pipe down to earl. Come in there and beat to a bloody pulp. My mother would yell from her down the hall. The invisible tiger scared. Our mother did not. Watch this. I to patty as i leaned over the of my bed and slowly wiggled fingers down into the pit, shed poke her curly little head over the side of her bed and stare the big black hole nervously wheezing as she waited for one of the tigers to take the bait id squeeze my eyes shut, imagining the hungry skulking towards us the smell of their musky fur, filling my nostrils i feel the thumping of my heart in the middle of my throat. I said, pipe down. My mother would call out weaker this time. We knew she didnt have the to beat us, much less any bloody pulp. My mother, an erstwhile debutante with a genius iq, now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies blistered bottoms, wiping snot off our faces, plastering our colleagues with her spit, and dripping warm medicine into our oozing, infected canals. She stuffed lunch bags with Peanut Butter and potato chip as she helped us conjugate out, latin verbs folded while she quizzed us and multiple occasion tables and typed our turn between bouncing a baby on our lap and ironing our uniform. My mother was my mother. Oh, im sorry. Her own mother was. And she had no sisters. So it fell to my mother to raise her eight children, more or less by herself, while my father was out of town most of the week business my father, bill kissinger, we called him homer. So the advertising space to companies that manufacture tranquilizers and other socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals to harried of the baby boom business was brisk, especially in our north shore chicago neighborhood, where women, a great number of them irish catholics, like my mother, were expected, fill the pews with as many childrens they could bear, whether they had the stamina or not. Our fathers sudden changes and our mothers and our mothers melancholia made us tense like little deer teetering the forest vulnerable and unprotected. We fretted that the tigers could bounding toward us at any. Or maybe they creep up on us slowly slinking through the grille, slinking through the glades, as tigers often do. We wanted to be good. We tried our best to be brave. Once we dared ourselves to fall asleep, Holding Hands over the tiger pit. But we never stopped worrying about the beast that we imagined swirled between our beds. We knew we were no match for them and we dreaded the day that they would rip us apart. It seemed like only a matter of time. Indeed, one day the tigers did come. Do you want me to finish that little end of the chapter. Sure. If you feel if youre. If youre up for it, that be great. Sure. Okay. They were not real tigers, i think. They were not real tigers, of course, but a menace as ferocious with a power just as deadly. They and clawed until they made mincemeat each of us all. Some in our family were devoured head to toe. Never to be seen again. A sister ripped to shreds and swallowed whole. Then, years later, brother snatched before very eyes. We could see it happening. We just couldnt do anything to save him. Or maybe we were too scared to try. Those of us who were left to hide. But the beasts were relentless. Just when we thought that we were free, no one would spring toward us. And then another. And another. Eventually we were all mauled and mangled. No one escaped unscathed in time. We learned that if we were to survive, we couldnt just shiver under our covers the way patti and i used to. Wed each have to figure out a way to fight back, wrestle those to the ground. Parliament to submission once and for all, if not that surely come back and get us to. Wow. What a great way to start a book. So thank you. Looking back on life in, the kissinger household, what would the signs even in retrospect in retrospect that things were not all good with your mom and dad and with some of your siblings. And what strategies did you and your siblings devise to deal with some of the chaos and confusion that seems to have reigned. Yeah, i think first picked up on it, you know, as. Five year old. My mom who was really, you know, loving, wonderful person but she could be very spacey. She she would often kind of drift off. And it was hard to kind of get to her. She was quite busy. You know, it was just outlined. She had eight kids and 12 years and a husband that was gone a lot. But how we would cope with that was, you know, we lean on each other, think we would look to each other for comfort. My sister patty and i roommates that, we were you know, we would allow ourselves sleep. My mom didnt have the bandwidth to, you know, attend to us too much. She did read to us each night, which i loved. But, you know, we didnt have there wasnt we have the full opportunity to get right to sleep every night or so. We kind of did that for other. And then as we got older, you know, and things were more apparent that there was trouble within, we just again, we tried to kind of find comfort with each other. You know, where i grew up was really an enclave of very big families. You know, being catholic. And and in the neighborhood that we grew up in was one of some wealth. So we had we had some privilege and there were just big old families and and and if you ran out of a brother and sister, there were, plenty of families down the block with of spare brothers and sisters. So we all kind of these families kind of melded together and im sure i know as an adult, i know that were a lot of those families were also struggling with alcohol abuse or Mental Illness. So we looked to each other yeah. As you had to i guess you write a lot about secret in your family some of which you didnt figure out until decades later as you were writing the book. For example, you had an uncle, all you knew about him or, thought you knew, was that he was a pilot who died during World War Two. Us what you learned about him and other pilots in training. Yeah. Rob, this blew me away. So this was. Was my fathers older brother, jack. And we imagined or i think we just assumed that was killed. And we knew he had died during World War Two and that he was a pilot. So i think we connected the dots and assumed that he was killed someplace in germany or japan, you know, violently. But what i and again, my parents and my dad never talked about it and neither his parents. My and grandpa did. They they lived with us off and on for some time. We were young and all we knew about uncle jack was we said a prayer for him every night when we would say grace at dinner we would always include a shout out to uncle jack. Anyway, what i came to learn getting his army records. Was that he was killed in texas on american soil. Of course, in training and. And that it was they were so desperate pilots in the early going. This was in 1943. So the beginning of the american involvement, the war. And they would take these young guys and just put them up on these planes with almost no. And that was the case of my uncle who was scrambling to finish his Flight Training and went up on a saturday unsupervised. And i came to learn that. Over 50,000 young im assuming men although i was probably exclusively men in those days, 15,000 die in training. Thats just staggering to me. And its a story that is not very widely known or told. So that was one secret, you know, another was on my moms side, the family, my youngest brother was born when she was away at her freshman year of college. She was embarrassed that her mother was having a baby while she was afraid that people going to think was her because she was 18 years old. And if she was a little baby around the neighborhood that would make the assumption that it was her her baby. But anyway, my also named john was born with down syndrome, but my grandparents were never really accepting that and they really resisted the opportunity to get him into the care that he needed and. So that was a i think that was a great source of great sorrow and frustration for my mom. So they came into the marriage of them with these these these secrets and these and the sadness from within. And they had never really resolved those traumas when they began own baby production. So it was on shaky ground. This family was even launched. Yeah, i have to tell the piece about the pilots in training struck a chord with me because. My own father tried to fake his way into. The air force. He had, you know, he had bad vision. And he tried to be he tried. He volunteered, you know. He tried to volunteer, and he he tried to fake his way through the vision test, but to do so and ended up the in the army and it just it makes me realize that im glad that he i am glad he didnt he didnt make his way into the into a pilot, into the career as a pilot that he wanted. Right. We wouldnt be having this conversation and probably. Thats right. Thats right. So your moms hospitalization later . Well, i just i just gave away the punch line. I going to say there was a time there was a that you came downstairs and your mother was nowhere to be seen and your father loaded you into into the car and drove you off somewhere. Tell us about that. Yeah. So this was had just moved back from connecticut. My dad had started a bone. He another guy started this magazine thats still around. Its called physicians management. And it was intended to be of a business magazine for physicians and tips on how to manage their practice. But the the beauty of it was it was chock full of advertisements and this is in the early 1960s, 61, 62 and tranquil officers were coming on to the marketplace, fast and furious, milltown, the early versions of of prozac or i should say. Sedatives of anyway, the the socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals which which meant that you got prescriptions for them and america was going gangbusters with pharmaceutical sales. So we moved down to connecticut so that my dad could manage the business in new york city and lived in a idyllic town of new canaan but it went bad for my father quickly and he began kind of have doubts about his Business Partner and the tension between the two became so much that he quit he ended up suing his Business Partner so there was tumult and we moved back in a hurry and my dad bought this house that my mother had not even seen. And it was not really to her liking anyway. She was quite frazzled and she had just had her seventh baby and i was going into first grade and i came down the stairs one morning and she was just gone. Anyway, we were not told she was. We had no idea. I thought maybe she had another baby. But the other, the other, the current was only about five months. So just didnt know, you know. I didnt know details at that stage of the game. Anyway, we were hauled off my sister patty and i to my uncles house in and it was an adventure. But it was a scary adventure because. We had no idea where the heck we were going or so we were there for. I dont really think we were even there very long. Rob but when youre five years old, three days or however long it was, seemed a long time. And especially when you dont know why youre there. So i came to learn that it was my mother was just being hospitalized for depression and would go back into the hospital. A few months later it was and just kind of almost like cinematically it was very week that president kennedy was assassinated. So, you know, america is mourning this horrible tragedy. I am a little first grader worrying about where my mother is. So it was a pretty intense time in my life and the life of america. Yeah. And that hospitalization of your mother would be followed by others and later by the decline of your sister nancy into into severe depression and to her death by suicide. Some years later, brother danny also took his own life. So how did your family navigate and talk these issues about the Mental Health problems that were, you know, smacking you in the face . Yeah, well, the short answer is we didnt so at first, i mean, ultimately we it could not have been avoided. But i will tell you about the night that my sister nancy died. So nancy was very troubled and again and that so were now were talking about the murder. 1970s. We didnt have the term they didnt to people as bipolar. I think now they would that would probably what she would be called but she had severe mood swings. She was very impetuous. She got psychotic. She she had hallucinations and delusions. Ive seen some medical records. It refers to her as having schizophrenia or schizophrenia disorder. I kind of think more. She was and i im not a medical professional by any stretch, but knowing what i do now know, having spent so many years, you know, writing about the Mental Health system, my hunch that she was really bipolar but had psychotic features nonetheless. She was quite ill and it was very disruptive you know, she could be violent. She could be very menacing. She could be very she was hilarious. And she was brilliant. But she could be a tough one to live with. So i steered clear her. I was four years younger than she, but we i just knew to to stay out of her path. And when she got sicker and sicker, i was a teenager and i was frustrated with her i was angry with her for taking up all the oxygen in the room, making my mom and dad so worried. You know, my dad was a very emotional guy and he would youd cry. He would be so worried about her and so and my mom was not one to show great emotion. I think maybe that went hand in glove with her depression and or more of a flat affect. But i knew that she was very worried about. So when nancy now she had many, many, many suicide attempts and some more public than others. But when finally did die and i, i go into kind of the mystery surrounded the actual, the day that she did finally die. And what i learned in writing this book, which really me and i wont spoil it, im going to add that as a little twist. But i will tell you this that the night that she died, my dad called us all into the room and he instructed, you know, in no uncertain terms, said if anybody asks this was an accident. So that seemed kooky to me like. Why would anybody in the world buy that . Everybody had known everybody in our parish, everybody our block, all of our friends knew that nancy had attempted suicide many times. They werent going to by my any kind of cockamamie explanation, that that it was an accident. But and my dad was to be mean. He worried he was worried that she would not be afforded a funeral, that the Catholic Church did not look thoughtfully or kindly on people who die by suicide. They consider that a a mortal sin. And you were not to be given a funeral or be buried on catholic grounds. My dad, one of my dads best friends, had a son who died the year before of suicide, and my dad went to that funeral and came heartbroken. Their parish priest knew that the that the boy had died by suicide and didnt his body into the church. So they had a memorial service. The boys casket was, you know in a in a hearse idling down the block. So anyway that was the that was the atmosphere that that nancy died and and that a the motivation for my dad telling us not to not reveal that she had died by suicide but what that did to me was to make me more ashamed and to suggest that nancys death was something that we should be ashamed of and that that this her Mental Illness was a choice and and i think that set the stage i know it set the stage for us to try and push that down. Her funeral was she died on a friday night her was on monday morning on tuesday i back to my summer job i was going into my senior year of college we all just went on about our and really we never sat down as family to discuss it. That seems insane to me now. But but thats how thats how it was for us. Yeah you theres a little passage in the book where you about sort of the way that your you know sort of dealt with some of this and im just going to read that our family language of wisecracks and one liners is had been our way of keeping us all from panicking to distract us from the truth. We were scared out of our minds. We used humor as a kind of bandaid. Keep the fear and anger infecting us. But wounds also need fresh air and sunlight to heal. And we still werent ready to sit down as a group and thoughtfully consider what was happening. We were simply in survival mode. Something clicked with all of us. In the months after danny died, we began to feel cursed. If this could happen twice in our family, why not a third time or a fourth . Was there something in our gene pool that would kill each of us are gene and bill pool, as we called it, referring to the names of your parents. We started looking around, wondering who might be next, nature or nurture. Either way, we were in trouble take to alcoholics one with bipolar and the other with crippling anxiety and let them have eight kids in 12 years. What could possibly go wrong. That passage really just struck me and. I think it sums up a lot about about your family and about and it also kind of epitomizes your writing, which just is so direct and to the point as well as the as the sort of gallows humor that think circulated in your family right. When you look at the Mental Illness course through your family, what do you conclude about that about that nature nurture, genes, environment, question that you pose in that in that passage . And do you think what do you think could have made a difference in your. To have maybe helped prevent the suicides of nancy and danny if anything. Yeah i do that my i know that bipolar runs in our family. And were still at such you know in the infancy of really understanding Mental Illness in the way that we do other illnesses i know theres a lot of research. Theres a lot of good people. Were working really hard to help us better understand that. But were so far from that. So anything i say is going to be based on conjecture, but my instinct is that we are prone to that. We have that the same way that a lot of families have either like the brac, a gene for cancer, or some other hereditary illness, its just loud easy in our family. And what could have us was a lot, you know, could have had early intervention. And both in the schools you know, our teachers could have been on the lookout for this social workers Family Therapy for sure you know i now know a of families who are going through some of the similar some similar things that our family went through and theyre getting good care theyre theyre getting Family Therapy. The the therapies are inviting the parents in and the siblings and workshopping to deal with this erratic behavior and its in our day you know as when nancy was first getting ill and then others our family too we seen as the enemies we were seeing this kind a root cause and you know the old adage the old storyline of the coal old and distant father and this geezer genic mother and how the parenting was the of their Mental Illness. And we now know thats a bunch of hooey and so i know that we could have been helped i think especially in the case of my brother danny. So danny was the second youngest in our family and nancy was the second oldest. They were ten years apart. And danny was always he was 14 years old when nancy died. And he was very embarrassed to have a sister who died by suicide. And he did tell people that she died in an accident. And he always saw that as a weakness, which is so ironic because he would later go on, develop his own very fierce version of of bipolar and this the discrimination and the shame of of Mental Illness was really very strong him and i, i really feel that if we had more fully talked about nancy would taken out all the blame and the shame in and how she dealt with that. He would have felt freer when own bad thoughts started coming on and he would have been able to confide more in us and gotten greater comfort from us and and i thought so much of course spent hundreds hours, you know, over my life thinking why did my brother and sister to that point and and and i think people decide to die by suicide really feel theres no other option theres no better way out for them. And i wish so much that been able to have these conversations so that they had better other alternatives. So lets shift gears now to your work as a journalist what made you decide to pursue high paying, glamorous career of a print reporter and how quickly and did you latch on to the Mental Health beat you . Yeah, you know whats so funny is my first job was in upstate new in watertown, new york. I had idea where that was. I did not Pay Attention to geography class. And when they said new york thought, oh, blooming, ill go shopping on the weekend, go to broadway. Well, its seven and a half hours, rob. Its a way from watertown to new york city, but and i had forgot and this my my old editor a great guy by the name of john johnson who i still Exchange Christmas with, found a series that i did back then. And Mental Health and teenagers and im sure that was me trying to learn what i could through the lens of a journalist because i had not been offered that the sister of somebody who just died by suicide or you know somebody who has a substantial amount of mental in the family. So i think i was using again, i dont think know i was using my journal as kind of a cover to get my own therapy and i could do that without any of the trappings of secrecy. I could i could very aggressively and full throated lee, you know investigate what it was like to struggle with Mental Illness and what is whats available for people. And, you know, not a surprise there especially in those days was not a lot available and not a lot of sustained good care. So i just gravitated i think that again a curious person in me gravitated to those stories. Even though i covered a lot of things in my career i covered crime and the courts for many years. At one point when my kids were tiny, i wrote a gossip column of all things. It was just a way for me to stay in daily. While raising two tiny kids. But i always found my way back to stories about people with Mental Illness. The shabby ways that theyre treated. To me, it never stopped shocking me. I am. I never i never become inured or or numb to the fact that we do such a horrible job in caring for people who need so much. So i want to give viewers a little taste your news writing and that and the incredible empathy i think that comes through in that work. This is from a piece you wrote and it was published as part of a series in 2000 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and. What was the title of the series . It was called promises, which is kind the title of every investigative series, i think. But that was it. Broken promises. Okay, he talks a deep round voice that sounds like a tape recording in slow motion, his jaw is clenched and his steel blue eyes are darting across the east side restaurant, where the owner feeds him for free. If he promises not to beg outside the front door. Its been a long slide from kitchen of his childhood, and while a to where he his parents, his brothers and sisters bowed heads each night chanting, bless us, the lord. And these thy gifts, the eating garbage out of trash cans in the alleys of the east side. John is 40 years old and he has been mentally ill as long as anyone can remember. His doctors say he has schizoaffective disorder, a relative rare disorder marked by symptoms of schizophrenia, manic mania and depression. He hear his voices. Sometimes he thinks god whispering in his ear. Other times its satan, him mocking him, daring him do his evil handiwork. Laura, his girlfriend from seventh grade giggles and at least he hears her voice sometimes. He cant stop laughing. Other times cries so hard he chokes. In the past five years hes also been addicted to cocaine a tiny way to escape the funhouse mirror of his mind. Roughly one third of all people diagnosed as mentally ill abused drugs and alcohol. The national Mental Health association reports. If this were before 1975, john might have been locked up in a hospital, told when could eat, where he could smoke. His beloved who his friends would be, and often how to shave. Today he walks free sleeps outdoors, bums, money off, strangers guzzles 40 ounce cans of beer has sex with strange men, a cage in exchange for rocks of crack cocaine. A six month journal investigation of the plight the mentally ill in milwaukee found people like john wandering, living in squalor, imprisoned in vast numbers and warehoused in Nursing Homes or other institutions where they get little, if any, care. Thats powerful. Meg, tell me about this series and and the reaction to it. Yeah. So oh the wonderful johns for all who i ended up by that guy. He died two years ago of covid. But his family, his mother lived a long time. Then from. He did . Yeah, he did. Yeah, he really was. He was a champ. He was an brilliant man. Hilarious. I, i think i left. I dont cant remember laughing hard as when i did when i was with john spruill and another woman who also spent many years writing about. But, but what propelled me to this was, that i would see people know out around town who i knew had Mental Illness in the same way that my sister did and the same way that my others in my family did and it and it just seemed like how how is it that theyre not getting care . And when i found this rural family, i felt i was looking into my own window. You know, they there just the love earliest family and the most intelligent, caring. Just thoughtful. And i thought if this could happen to one of their own, it could happen to. Anybody and. I think that thats i think again, i think i know that we are so quick to judge people with Mental Illness and really we really want to say assign blame thats just a human instinct. I and and its must be something that the parents did you know its some character flaw it cant just be that theyre ill this is bad and its willful behavior and and it needs to be punished and i just know thats not true and john to me johns for all personified that for me were all so so so ready to and many journalists unfortunately are so ready to to caricature your people with many mental and. You know whats amazing . You know whats just so impressive to me is way that you, you know, when youre really rich portraits of the people that you write about, you know, you spent a lot of time with them and you theyre human. Theyre fully fleshed beings, which is just i think its a gift and its its its so important to it in covering this this this field. But it also must have been you immersed yourselves in these stories, given your own family history. It must have been incredibly difficult emotionally and psychologically for you. And i wonder how you coped with. Yeah, i its funny you should mention that. Rob, thank you for that. That was generous description of my writing and i, i havent i havent read that stuff about jasper for so many years and that is how i remember him, how i dealt with it was go harder, harder and harder and so that was that was not good. You know, i now im a trainer the dart center on trauma and journalism at columbia university. So work is now with journalists writing about Mental Health and what advise them is what i wish somebody would have advised me, which is, you know, this is intense. These are human beings who are struggling and suffering. And you need to be mindful of your own Mental Health. But i on such a mission, you know, i really had a feisty streak in me that i wanted people to know the injustice. Im really still just flattened by the discrimination against people with mental and just makes me so angry and i just think people need to really that so that was the fuel me that kept going and telling stories over so many i mean i was at this for over five years, but towards the end of that time i really got ground into into the dirt. I just i really felt like i was again on a mission. And i always tell my students, you know, journalists are not advocates. We are are in favor of the truth. We want people to we want to shine a light, but we are not lobbying politicians. We are we are showing whats happening and letting the change makers do it how they will. Thats a very thin line. It is blurred a but but i really feel that that was my task was to just hold a light up to people with Mental Illness and show them in all their humanity so they are not saints, but neither are they sinners . Theyre a little bit of both. Theyre human beings. But anyway, but my own Mental Health i ultimately was, you know, really, you almost getting flashbacks of own. You know, i write in the book about how sometimes at night i would lie there thinking about this story that i was working on and see, you know, my, my mother, my brother and my sister. One time i was in a laundromat, i was doing a series of articles about the horrific for people with severe Mental Illness. And these were people who used to be institutionalized. And when they started downsizing the asylums and the and the state county mental hospital, there was not there were not good exit plans. There were there was not good permanency planning. And a lot of these were ended up in single room only or boarding houses and. They were hellholes, rat infested, exposed wires, awful places. And i was chronicling that anyway, i ended up at a laundromat in milwaukee and there was a really funny lady in there that i could just tell was just a character. So naturally gravitated towards her. Anyway, long story short, turns out she told me that was from a little town outside of chicago. And i said, really . Where . And she says, oh, you never heard of it . Its called wilmette. And i said like, shut up, im from wilmette. And she said, no, you shut up. We of pushing each other like, you know, elaine seinfeld. Anyway, she knew my sister, nancy, they had been together in the psych ward at evanston past little. And i thought, wow, know things have really come full circle like here i am profiling a woman who could have been my sister and knew my sister so that was wonderful and horrible at the same time, i came to really follow her for many years too. Died and she died. Her family kindly asked me to give the eulogy and i became very fond of her, and thats kind of a, you know, an occupational when you spend so much time with the people that youre writing about, you tend fall in love with them or you dont care about them so deeply. And i eventually stopped writing about. Georgia was her name. I stopped about georgia because i did consider her to be a dear friend. I didnt want to meld those roles, but i would tell myself the now book writing lady, tell the reporter lady, you need to take some mental breaks of your own. I had a guy in the newsroom one time telling me its, like, maggie, youre starting to look like people you cover. And it was true. I was getting kind of ground down. Wow. So when you decided to do the book that was obviously a big decision and you knew you were going to have to do, you know, referred before to to like having to foya for your brother and sisters medical records. But you were also youre also writing about very personal stuff you know your surviving siblings. How did you do you know was that a struggle to get them to go along with this and did you know did what was attitude toward it and what did you fear would be their attitude toward it. Right. I address this on the very first page in my authors note because the fact of the matter is i love my brothers and sisters so much and i and i care about them so much. I put that way over any of ambition that i have as a journalist, you know. So i would say in the hierarchy of things i am, you know, a and a mother and now grandmother and a sister first and then a journalist but i hope that i can combine those roles. But i was not worth it to me if this was going to cause a rift with any my my brothers and sisters, wed all been through way too much for me to add pile on anymore agony. So i reached out to all of them and said, i want to do this. I want to bear witness and, tell what it was like for our family. But im going to do it in the way that i would do. One one of my investigative proj. And i am going to im going to seek out all these records and look through moms and look through homers. Then chicken scratches. And as a book and im going to go for tilt here and i dont know what im going find. So, but if you want to blackball this, tell me right now to a person didnt flinch and i knew i loved them anyway, but then i really loved them because they gave not just the green light, but then as i was putting this together, i had so many questions and i would call at all hours texting, calling or emailing, and they to a person, they answered my questions they allowed me to tell very personal things about them that i didnt even know. Heres a quick my sister patty, my little tiger pit pal. She ended up in a psych ward in milwaukee when she was a senior in college. I never knew that. I later went on to write about the psychiatric hospitals in milwaukee. I had no idea over those years my own sister, patty been a patient there. At one point. So this very intense stuff and i put it all in google. Doc, you know the the the coroners report and the police files and the medical records. And i, i said to them, i have i have all this if you want to access it, have at it. And if you dont, then perfectly fine too. The only thing im going to ask you is, before i hit the send button to the editor, i want you to read this book and let me know, you know, is this accurate, first of all. And if there is, theres anything thats going to cause you so much heartache that it shouldnt be in there. They all read it. They corrected a few, but there was nothing in there. Nothing that they said please dont put it in there. And theres some there are some intimate details in there. So thank you mary kay, jake, patty and molly. I love you. Right. Lets talk a little bit. We only have a few minutes left. Lets talk a little bit about about policy and actually early in and connected to family, too, in a way early in the book you note a connection between your family and that of the kennedy family. So tell me about that and then about legacy of john f kennedy, the 1963 community Mental Health act. Yeah, well, i mean, the kennedys were irish and catholic. There were a lot of them and a lot of and they died tragically, many of them. And yeah rosemary who famous infamously had been the subject of a le bother me, you know, the horrific well the guy who developed a lobotomy won the Nobel Peace Prize but anyway nonetheless thats a book and all in and of itself but she ended up being so disabled by her by this procedure that she ended up of all places st columbas in jefferson in wisconsin in the very facility that my mothers brother john was at. And so president i think because of his experience and his sister Eunice Shriver was very involved in Special Olympics and then calling attention to the needs of people with, Developmental Disabilities and Mental Illness. And they greatly encouraged him to to sign this Mental Health act of 1963. He it on october 31st. It was the last thing he did. He was gunned down in dallas two weeks later. And him died. Lot of the enthusiasm for Mental Health not to say that he was the guy out there agitating or championing Mental Health reform, but after his assassination, you know, the country went on to pressing among them the investigation about his assassination and of course, the vietnam war and civil unrest. Anyway, what happened was nothing good. They did empty out a lot of the asylums and but they did not build the community Mental Health centers that they promised fewer than half that they had earmarked were ever built. So people were ushered, you know, out of care, a lot of it horrible care, but care nonetheless. And to nothing. So, rob, i know we are pressed for time, but i just want to say, you know, your own creation, you know, mindsite news, which is the website site or the news aggregator and the news that i spent my whole life wishing for. You know, you now covering these issues so many years later, you know, here we are 60 years and beyond this push for health reform. And we still doing a very lousy job at it. And im grateful. Your organization for burden forgiveness, you know, youre on the lookout for for what we need to do in this country to make Mental Health care much more robust. And so our work continues and we need to do a whole lot more of it and i and this just one way this is kind of my. Aside for my journalism. This was my to narratively again tell what one family goes through. So were in a lot of company there are a lot of kissinger, a lot of families out there like the kissinger family that need to need better Mental Health care. So yeah. And, you know, one positive thing, i mean, you know, im struck when i when i read that passage from, you know, 2000 about, you know, how little changed. And when i think back to my own reporting on Mental Health and in like the eighties, how little has changed. We were writing about, you know, people going the street into the into jails, the Emergency Hospital and back on the and and all of that is is so much the same now except its even in far greater numbers. But one thing i mean, you know, i guess a couple of positive notes. One is that, you know, in the last couple years, more money has been allocated for Mental Health than than than ever. And secondly and youll see, since you teach a Mental Health reporting class at columbia, theres there are finally, you know, people who have the ambition, young, young journalism students, reporters who really want to cover Mental Health, which was like you were the only Mental Health reporter practically in the country for a long time. So how does how does it look to you now. Yeah, no, i agree. Im thrilled. I students are fantastic. They are. Theyre so eager to write that theyre equally as outraged as i have been all these years. And they are they have such skill and and theyre theyre also willing share their own stories mean they grew up now and their generation is much freer they feel freer to talk about this. And you know i think its its so easy to get discouraged. Rob. And, you know, i think thats thats we really need to keep pushing and. I think about, you know, how aids how how gay gay people in the in early eighties agitated and really fought for greater government response to the aids crisis and i, i am so grateful for the example they set the template thats there and think that people with serious mental need to do the same need to borrow from that playbook and really demand and fuller care and we journalists, you know, need to be telling these stories again and again and again and putting faces on it. Humanize these people who are suffering and and insisting on nothing than good care. Well, thank meg. Youve youve youve helped the trail of doing exactly that and set a really really example for how this can be done. Were trying to keep going and and build on at mindsite news and and thank you so much for spending spending time today talking about your amazing book best of luck to you. Thank you, rob. It was such pleasure t