Author Katherine Flannery Dering in a wide ranging and emotional interview on Schizophrenia Community Radio discusses how her family helped their brother with treatment resistant schizophrenia till his death from lung cancer.

Bedford, NY Oct 15, 2015

Katherine Flannery Dering is the author of Shot in the Head A Sister's Memoir, A Brother's Struggle which describes her brother Paul's decent into psychosis at the age of 16 and how the family of 10 siblings took up the challenge of caring for him after their parents' death.

As Katherine explains, when her brother, in his 40s at the time, was in a nursing home with much older residents, he told them that he had been shot in the head as an explanation of his mental state. Ms Dering suggests that people are more sympathetic to those with a head injury than to those with a mental illness.

Paul was relatively lucky despite his treatment resistant illness because the family support helped to give him as good a life as possible. He was never homeless or in jail as so many with serious mental illnesses are and his family stuck by him as he moved from psychiatric hospditals to group homes and to other group homes.

Families do, however, usually feel guilt because they think they can do more when, in reality, there is only so much that can be done. And it was only when Paul was moved into a nursing home where he received proper meals and decent medical care that he began to show some improvement. Nursing homes for the elderly provide much better care than do homes for the psychiatrically ill. A shame for society that must be rectified.

Her message to other families is that it is easy to lose perspective when you are in the midst of caring for your relative but you are doing your part to make that person's life better. Caring for someone at the end of their life like she and her siblings did, is the right think for all of us to do. It is what makes us human.

To hear the full interview, visit Schizophrenia Community Radio http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/88008/schizophrenia-f...

Shot in the Head A Sister's Memoir, A Brother's Struggle ISBN  978-1927637210 is distributed by Ingram and is availalbe at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in all e-book versions. It's Amazon rating is 4.8 out of 5 stars on 21 reviews.

For more information, visit http://bridgeross.com/shotinthehead.html

Media Contact: Marvin Ross, [email protected] 289-260-0229