Q&A with Meg Kissinger, award-winning mental health reporter, journalism professor, and author of "While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence"
During an award-winning career at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Meg Kissinger made a name for herself writing powerful stories about mental health that led to important policy changes. After leaving the paper in 2016 to teach journalism at Columbia University, she began working on a memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, a project that gave her an opportunity to dig more deeply into her family’s mental health experiences.
Celadon Books published the memoir in November 2023. The paperback comes out tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 3. It’s a powerful, profound story. After reading it earlier this summer, my first thought was, “Wow. Meg and I have so much in common! I really want to talk to her.”
The truth is, on the surface, Meg and I have very little in common: she grew up with seven siblings in a sporty, boisterous Catholic family that lived an upscale Chicago suburb. I grew up with one sister in upstate New York, in an upscale neighborhood we could afford only because the congregation where my dad was the rabbi bought the house. Meg’s dad was a businessman, her mom “an erstwhile debutante” from an old money Milwaukee family. My mom was the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant peddler-turned-dairy-farmer and his adolescent bride. Unlike Meg’s family, which went on skiing, fishing and camping trips, my family’s idea of physical activity was to read a book while sitting in a rocking chair.
What Meg and I share is that we grew up with mentally ill relatives in an era—the 1960s and 70s—when nobody talked about mental health. My dad died by suicide when I was 13. Meg’s mother suffered from severe anxiety and was hospitalized several times during Meg’s childhood, hospitalizations that were never explained. Meg’s dad had undiagnosed bipolar disorder. An older sister, Nancy, died by suicide when Meg was in college. A younger brother, Danny, died the same way nine years later.
The other thing Meg and I had in common: we both became newspaper reporters. When we talked on August 30, I learned that at least one of the reasons we chose that career was similar: to ask questions of other people that we were afraid to ask our own families. Interestingly, though, Meg’s first article about mental illness wasn’t a reported piece. It was a personal essay, inspired after she began thumbing through her high school yearbook after a sleepless night with her inconsolable five-month-old son and discovered goofy notes and drawings that Nancy had scribbled there.
“Nancy, dead for more than eight years by then, was still finding ways to mess with me,” she writes in While You Were Out. “As I sat in my bedroom in the predawn darkness, I was overwhelmed thinking about how much I missed her then and how I wished she could have met my baby boy.”
Meg is now a trainer for the Columbia University School of Journalism’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. She and I covered a lot of ground in our nearly hour-long conversation, and one of the questions I asked was about that initial essay, which was published in 1987, nine years after Nancy threw herself in front of a train in a very public act that their father insisted the family tell everyone was an accident.
DW: What kind of reaction did you get to the essay?
MK: It was overwhelming. In those days, people weren’t writing about their own personal accounts of suicide so it drew a lot of attention. I heard from all these people that they had people in their family who died by suicide. Also, my editors knew that now they could call on me to write stories about mental health and it was galvanized after [my brother] Danny died. My late great editor, Don Walker, said, “I remember that essay you did about your sister. Would you write another one now that your brother has died by suicide about what it’s like for a family go to through this twice?” And I was like, “Are you out of your mind?”
DW: But you did it.
MK: I thought, he’s actually right, this would be a good opportunity. That ran in August of 98— 11 years [after the essay about Nancy]. It was horrible—not a very well-written story. I was still really grieving, so it was kind of cliché or treacly, but it didn’t matter because again, all those years later it was still fairly novel to write something so personal in a newspaper and so I got a huge reaction. By now the internet was out. People could email you. I got a ton of phone calls. Then I was like really established as somebody who wanted to write about that stuff, so that kind of sealed my fate as a reporter who wrote about mental illness.
DW: One of the most interesting stories in your book is about the article you wrote about a mom, Debbie Sweeney, who moved her mentally ill son from Wisconsin to California to try to get better care. As journalists, we’re supposed to maintain distance from our subject matter, but you were traveling with Debbie literally and, in a way, metaphorically. How hard was it to maintain that distance? And did you worry that you were identifying with her, or even over-identifying with her?
MW: I think it was really hard and I think I did over-identify with her. That was a struggle for me because I kept seeing my mother in her and all the heartache that she was experiencing and the frustration with her son Rob, and I was haunted by it. When I look back on it now, my narrative about that time was I feel that that was kind of my breaking point where I was like, my journalism is doing some good in calling attention to the subject but it’s not enough. I was getting really burned out and I think it showed me what the limit of my reporting was. That was a real reckoning for me. When I came back and wrote the series, Deb ended up putting herself in a hospital because she was feeling suicidal. And as I put in the book, I asked myself the question, Did my stories make her life more difficult instead of helping her? In journalism, we always want to say we’re helping by shining a light on something and that’s true, but we can’t do it all.
DW: I sometimes feel like it’s my job to help everybody because I couldn’t help my father. Do you ever feel that way, like you have a bit of a savior complex?
MK: I don’t know about savior complex but I have a righteous indignation and an outrage that people with mental illness are given such shabby treatment and there is so much discrimination against people with these illnesses and that angers me a lot. And that was a big motivator and it still a motivator but especially in those early days when I was writing lots of stories about the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, the horrible housing conditions for people in Milwaukee. I had my brother and sister in mind and my mom and dad, too, the whole time, about how they’re human beings and I love them and we don’t do well enough for people. So yeah, I would say, savior complex, a little bit—but more righteous indignation.
DW: I think one of the most important points you make in the book is that people who are mentally ill need community support, not just in terms of medical care, but from family and friends. But as you show so well, sometimes it’s really hard to help a loved one who is mentally ill because either they don’t want help or they’re so difficult to deal with they drive you away. So I’d like to know, what advice do you have for people who have run out of patience or bandwidth or energy to deal with a mentally ill loved one? Where should they draw the line?
MK: I don’t have an easy answer for it. That’s kind of the cruellest irony of mental illness—that people who need help most desperately often behave in such ways that make them difficult to be around and serve as a great disincentive for wanting to help them. And also there’s a lot of denial—people not having insight into their own illness. My brother Danny is the greatest example of that in my family. Here’s a guy who clearly had very serious mental illness and would not acknowledge that. And not only that, but he would get very angry when you suggested it, so it was impossible to help him. As for what we do, the family members, it sounds very simple and it’s not, at all: you have to do what you can but set boundaries for yourself and you don’t want to go down with the ship. It’s a cliché but it’s true, about putting the mask over your own nose and mouth before you help somebody else do the same. You have to find ways to not become overwhelmed yourself and sucked into that vortex.
DW: There’s something particularly poignant about the fact that your sister Nancy seemed to be crying out for help in the 1970s, but nobody knew how to get her the help she needed. And later, your brother Danny was adamant that there was nothing wrong with him so he didn’t get help, either. And both of them ended up killing themselves. Meanwhile, your oldest brother, Jake, also had problems, but he’s still here, living in a group home outside of Chicago and very much a part of your family.
MK: We never kind of knew what Jake’s diagnosis was. He had depression and anxiety. I would say he was on the autism spectrum. There’s so much attention now on Gus Walz, and he looks to me a lot like Jake: he’s just very sweet, very unable to take social cues. Jake is super bright intellectually, but has a hard time organizing and communicating his thoughts. But he’s very good at saying how he feels and reaching out. He wants help and he has amazing humility and just the grace to ask for help. There’s no stigma or shame. He’s not at all ashamed of who he is.
DW: There was a lot in your book that resonated with me, particularly the way that the shame and secrecy around mental illness in your family affected your relationship with your siblings. The secrecy around my dad’s death pretty much killed my relationship with my sister for decades. When did you realize how much the shame and secrecy in your family had affected your sibling relationships?
MK: That was really over time, but again, when I was starting to put this together back in 2017-18 and when I was reflecting on it, I thought, can it really be true that after Nancy died in 1978 we never got together as a family and talked about it? We had no family therapy, we never talked to any professionals. As I wrote in the book, she died late on a Friday night, the wake was on Sunday, her funeral was on Monday and by Tuesday we were all back doing what we were doing. I was incredulous as I was writing. I thought, I can’t be remembering this correctly. I was checking in with my brothers and sisters and they were like, “No you’re right. We never talked about it. We just kept moving forward.”
DW: What was the long-term effect of not talking about it?
MK: As other people’s illnesses began to blossom, and most especially my brother Danny, we were afraid to talk about it. We didn’t have the language. We didn’t know how to talk about it, so when his illness began to really develop we just kind of turned away and we were just scared of it. And so I know there’s so much more we could have done to help him, but because of the shame and the secrecy around it we didn’t.
DW: There’s a lot that readers can take away from this memoir. Is there anything that’s especially important to you?
MK: Shame is toxic. Nothing good comes from shame. We’ve treated mental illness as a source of shame forever. We’re starting to kind of get away from that a bit, with social media and now post-pandemic, when people are more willing to talk about their own loneliness or isolation and fears. But as long as we’re going to hide the truth about mental illness, we’re going to be allowing that shame to fester. And shame is toxic. And again, nothing good comes from shame.
This is such a good Q&A with two people I highly respect. Thank you both.
Loved Meg’s book. Brought me back to the days as eldest of too-many children in a neighborhood crowded with them (along with parents beset with similar problems.) Thanks to both of you for writing so honestly. We are survivors.