Hello! My name is Heather, and I am on a mission. My passion is to help millions suffering debilitating brain diseases of mental illness, as well as their families supporting them who feel helpless.
I created this GoFundMe to help professionally finish my manuscript which tells the story of my mother and me. Here's a synopsis:
Trusting Resilience: Schizophrenia, Family and the Journey to Love takes readers on a fast-paced, emotionally harrowing cross-country journey from California to the Midwest, to the Smokey Mountains and the Deep South. After the death of her beloved father, a single woman just turning 40 is forced into the most difficult journey of her life: she must get help for her undiagnosed schizophrenic mother who has not left the house in over 15 years. Heather's quest is to love herself and her mother—while confronting the demons of mental illness that have terrorized her and her family into the bondage of dysfunction for a lifetime—while battling an inept American legal and mental health care system which repeatedly fails to help them. It's an edge-of-your-seat story of grit, hope, and redemption that will make you laugh and cry. Ultimately, Heather learns that letting go and letting God is the only way to save herself—and, miraculously, her mother—who gets help and begins to live a normal, functional independent life, free from mental illness—at the age of 65!
Mental illness is a serious and deadly problem that is woefully neglected. According to the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, one in four fatal law enforcement encounters, 29% of family homicides, and half of mass killings involve mentally ill people; 33,000 out of every million Americans has schizophrenia or bipolar disorder—and half of those are undiagnosed.
Our healthcare system is woefully inept with virtually no pathways to treatment for most. In 44 states, more mentally ill patients are currently in prison than in treatment. Perhaps at no time in history has the need been so clear to so many—we need to reinvent our American healthcare and justice systems to fix what is failing—from treatable mental illness.
Would it surprise you to learn when I was able to get my mother committed to a mental hospital in rural Mississippi, two U.S. Marshals came to her house, handcuffed her, put her in a police car and she sat in jail for two days while waiting for a hospital bed to become available? Or a few months after her hospital release, when she was on medicine and correct nutrition for her body, that she said "I wish someone would have done this for me 30 years ago." How we treat people is inhumane and heartbreaking. There is no dignity or peace for the afflicted or their families.
My story delivers an urgent, timely, and important message of hope:
Mental illness is a treatable disease!
We must remove the stigma and fix the system to get people help!
I need your help to turn my manuscript Trusting Resilience into a professionally edited marketable literary property with a book proposal. I have several interested literary agents waiting to see it. I also have a lead on a Hollywood filmmaker who is looking for projects like this.
All funds from this campaign will go towards professional final editing and creation of a book proposal. Any leftovers will go towards professional book promotions.
"No raffles, sweepstakes, giveaways, or promotions are offered in exchange for any donations made to this GoFundMe."