Who I work with
Parents of a child with serious mental illness
Much of my clinical experience was earned where mental illness is at its most acute: inpatient psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric emergency services, correctional mental health programs, and forensic mental health settings.
Whether your child is 14 or 66
If your child is living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, or another serious mental illness, I understand that your family may be dealing with considerably more than a diagnosis.
You may be dealing with hospitals, medications, police, courts, emergency rooms, treatment refusals, frightening behavior, broken relationships, or long stretches when the person you love seems unreachable.
You may find yourself trying to judge whether something is a crisis, whether to intervene, whom to call, what to believe, and how much responsibility you should carry for another adult's choices.
Those are hard decisions, and sometimes there is not a clean answer.
Understanding the illness
I can help you understand the illness, including what the diagnosis means and, just as importantly, what it does not. We can talk plainly about symptoms, treatment, medications, systems of care, risk, recovery, and what reasonable hope actually looks like.
And boundaries
Parents in these situations are often caught between two terrible fears. What happens if I do not step in? And how long can I keep doing this?
Sometimes love requires action. Sometimes it requires patience. Sometimes it requires accepting that you have reached the edge of what you can control.
Your child has an illness. You have a life too. My goal is to help you understand the first without surrendering the second.
What this is, and what it is not
Therapy for you. Not case management, not treatment or evaluation of your child, and not a support group. I am not an advocate and not a referral service: systems for serious mental illness vary enormously between counties, let alone between states, and I will not pretend to know what is available where you live.
If your child's difficulty is developmental rather than psychiatric, the autism and developmental disabilities page is the closer fit. Plenty of families belong in both, and we can sort that out on the first call.
Sixty-minute sessions by telehealth, anywhere in Colorado or California, scheduled around your life rather than an office's hours.