Family Guide to Mental Health Care

The Family Guide to Mental Health Care is the first comprehensive print resource for the millions of people who have loved ones suffering from some kind of mental illness. In this book, families can find the answers to their most urgent questions. What medications are helpful and are some as dangerous as I think? Is there a way to navigate privacy laws so I can discuss my adult daughter’s treatment with her doctor? Is my teenager experiencing typical adolescent distress or an illness? From understanding depression, bipolar illness and anxiety to eating and traumatic disorders, schizophrenia, and much more readers will learn what to do and how to help.

Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, is Medical Director of the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH), the nation’s largest state mental health system and New York State’s “chief psychiatrist.” He is Adjunct Professor at the Columbia/Mailman School of Public Health and has served as Acting Director of The Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Rockland County, New York. Dr. Sederer is a former Medical Director and Executive Vice President of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, one of the world’s foremost psychiatric hospitals, and a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, where he also served on the faculty.  In 2009, Dr. Sederer was recognized as Psychiatric Administrator of the Year by the American Psychiatric Association and was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar-in-Residence grant. He has also received an Exemplary Psychiatrist award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the largest family mental health advocacy group in the country. The author of seven textbooks and more than 350 professional articles and reports, he lectures across the country and the world to families of people with mental illness, as well as to mental health policy makers, government officials, and other professionals. He is the first medical editor of The Huffington Post, where he writes frequently about mental health and the addictions, as well as provides movie and book reviews. His Web site, www.askdrlloyd.com, is dedicated to helping people, and their families, get the care they need to recover from mental illness and the addictions. Glenn Close is a film, television, and stage actress who has become a leader on the issue of eliminating the stigma of mental illness through her advocacy organization, Bring Change 2 Mind.