The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness

Summary

Liza Long is the mother of a child with an undiagnosed mental disorder. When she heard about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, her first thought was, "What if my son does that someday?" She wrote an emotional response to the tragedy, which the Boise State University online journal posted as "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother." The post went viral, receiving 1.2 million Facebook likes, nearly 17,000 tweets, and 30,000 emails.

Now, in The Price of Silence she takes a devastating look at how we address mental illness, especially in children, who are funneled through a system of education, mental health care, and juvenile detention that leads far too often to prison. In the end she asks one central question: If there's a poster child for cancer, why can't there be one for mental illness? The answer: the stigma. Liza Long is speaking in a way that we cannot help but hear, and she won't stop until something changes.