Upcoming Events
Save the date: April 29, 2010 at 11:00 AM
The Friends of Children’s Center invite you to be a partner with us in ending the stigma of mental illness in our community! Our annual luncheon event hosted by the Friends will be held on Thursday, April 29, 2010, at the Hilton Hotel in Vancouver, Washington. The featured guest speaker for this year’s luncheon is Shelia Hamilton, news director and Morning Show co-host at 101.9 KINK FM radio. A former investigative reporter for KATU, her compelling book “The Other Side of Nothing” speaks about the impact of mental illness on the entire family. All proceeds from the luncheon support the mission of Children’s Center to provide quality mental health care for children and youth in Clark County.
I’m a reporter, a good one I like to think, but I missed much of the unfolding of my husband’s mental illness.
THE OTHER SIDE OF NOTHING - here's part of the backstory:
By the time I’d pieced together the puzzle of who Michael actually was, he was falling apart. My once brilliant, intense, and hilarious partner was dead within six weeks of a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder, leaving my nine-year-old daughter and me without as much as a note to understand his decision. He’d left us hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with no plan for helping us recover from the profound grief of his suicide.
THE OTHER SIDE OF NOTHING is the story of the last three months of my husband’s life and the year after he died. It is an unsettling descent from ordinary life into the world of mental illness, and an examination of the fragile line between reality and madness. I have laid bare my own contributions to our family’s problems and just how ignorant I was about Michael’s mental illness. It is also a love letter to my daughter, Sophie.
The story, if centered exclusively on our loss, would be devastatingly depressing. It’s not. In the months and years since Michael’s death, both of us have learned the redemptive quality of choosing life over retreat, of learning to love and trust again, and of forgiveness.
THE OTHER SIDE OF NOTHING is my attempt to shed light on the cruel impact mental illness has on an entire family—not just the sufferer. And how, even though Bipolar Disorder is an “illness” with some similarities to physical diseases, illnesses with behavioral components destroy more than one individual. The qualities of rage, despair, duplicity, promiscuity, unpredictability, and cruelty were all part of his illness—and yet, even after the diagnosis confirmed his condition, I felt I had to leave him. After a decade of feeling unloved, and unappreciated, I was desperate for change.
Five-time Emmy-winner Sheila Hamilton began her convergent reporting career in documentary film before producing and reporting two-decades of investigative news for such television stations as Portland’s KATU and Salt Lake City’s KTVR.
She has been a weekly political columnist for the Portland Tribune and a freelance feature writer for Portland Monthly and Outside. She authors the popular “Writing for Radio and Television” e-newsletter and teaches convergence journalism to seasoned reporters looking to move from print to radio or television. Sheila is the news director and Morning Show co-host at KINK. Listen to Sheila from 5:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.
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