I work in the mental health care system that Molly and her family travelled through. Once I started to read the manuscript, I could not put it down. I found it to be a very courageous and very personal account of one family's experience with the emergence of serious mental illness in a beloved family member.
Inman outlines their struggles with an underdeveloped and fragmented health care system, where a comprehensive and well-organized continuum of support through diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from mental illness is not yet available. Her sense of vulnerability and frustration were palpable through the chronological account of the unexpected challenges they encountered. Yet we also saw the incredible strength of family bonds that held close and nurtured the individual family members as they tried to find the help they so desperately wanted and needed. Where help was not available, they created it. They connected with others in similar situations and constructed a new system of support for themselves and for those who would come after them. Inman, and others like her, having found themselves in desperate circumstances, used their strengths, skills, creativity, and sheer determination to effect change in the system from the outside. She has continued to be part of a movement
that is working collaboratively with consumers, policy makers and health care providers to design a better mental health care system.
A tragedy and a love story with a beautiful ending of hope and inspiration for a new and different future.

Dr. Anne Howson, PhD
Psychologist
Vancouver Coastal Health

I highly recommend After Her Brain Broke". It is both enlightening and inspirational. Ms. Inman writes about her thoughts and feelings as she engages in a heroic struggle to get help for her daughter. This sharing of the battle will help readers in similar situations feel less alone. She also provides real information and practical help for these families. She encourages them not to give up and most importantly, to put guilt aside. In speaking about her encounters with various mental health professionals, Ms Inman not only helps patients and their families see professionals as people with both strengths and weaknesses, she also provides professionals with an opportunity to better understand those they hope to serve.

Susan Inman describes her journey as she watches her daughter descend into psychosis:

"When I allow myself to picture how Molly was and how little is left of her, I wail."

Then she talks about her struggle to find help and the professionals who hindered or helped her on the way. Finally, the right dose of the right drug plus rehab starts to work:

'One afternoon Molly is sitting in the chair in the living room where she spends vast amounts of time rarely moving or speaking. I know I should read more about catatonia but at this moment I am reading a soul nurturing novel. The steadiness in Molly's voice startles me.
"My head feels so much clearer."
So many words and they haven't been coaxed out of her. She is looking at me with a firm gaze.
"My head is clearer."
I squash the hope impulse that has gotten out of hand so many times before.
"Oh. Does it feel good?"
She is still completely present.
"Yes."'

This book is well-written, moving without being sentimental, informative without being pedantic. In the end, it provides hope, because we know one person who was so very sick has recovered with the help of her family and doctors.

In After Her Brain Broke Susan Inman writes a powerful description of her experience of parenting a child with a serious mental illness, an experience that is all too often not understood by mental health professionals. Her voice is an important one and needs to be heard. Parents, families and mental health professionals will find this book to be an invaluable resource. I will recommend it to my colleagues in the mental health professions and to my clients. After Her Brain Broke will have a prominent place in my practice library.

After Her Brain Broke is an insightful first-hand account of a journey through schizophrenia from the perspective of a mother.
Through her personal account, the author illustrates how schizophrenia affects both the sufferer and his or her family. Ms. Inman's story not only describes the mother's relentless struggle to help her daughter Molly, but constitutes a very valuable resource for families struggling with having a member suffering serious mental illness. Throughout her book, Ms.Inman demonstrates the importance of establishing a collaborative relationship between mental health professionals, community resources and the consumers' families.
Susan's account reveals how parental involvement and education on mental illness is crucial and, in many cases, this knowledge is what can provide families with the necessary tools to collaborate with the professionals in the treatment plan. The author advocates for approaches that educate, empower and mobilize families.
Ms. Inman's experiences in navigating the mental health system highlights the need for adopting an approach that involves the family members in the treatment. Molly's progress with those mental health professionals whose approach involved the family as part of the treatment, challenges the misguided view that some mental health practitioners have about blocking any family involvement in the treatment of consumers. Susan's account constitutes an eye opener to the deficiencies that still pervade the mental health field where some practitioners' poor training in serious mental illness can result in poor management practices for their clients and serious obstacles for their progress. This account leaves the readers wondering how come unprofessional behavior is not accountable.
Susan's account exposes the limited resources in the community for helping consumers and their families deal with the challenges embedded in the daily lives of people with serious mental illness. However, she does not respond passively to this lack of resources but takes a proactive stance and works in envisioning innovative ways to tap existing resources and use them to help her daughter. Susan becomes Molly's "case manager" and organizes a rehabilitation program for her daughter involving university students studying health care whose involvement in Molly's daily life would provide her with a "constant invitation to try to rejoin this world". Susan also brings a novel element to courses taken by consumers and families by stressing the importance of inviting consumers who have recovered to present their stories to other consumers and families who are in the midst of their difficult journey. The author's creation of a Mothers Group, where mothers of consumers meet to share and discuss their experiences, is another example of Susan's commitment to envision creative ways to help families of consumers.
In addition to presenting readers an inspiring and engaging account of her personal journey navigating through the system and learning about serious mental illness, Ms. Inman offers medical and literary perspectives on mental illness, She explains the workings of psychotropic drugs, giving an account of their effects. Susan provides the reader with excellent resources and a bibliography.

an eye-opening portrayal of the harrowing experience of a family coping with the devastating mental illness of a child.

This book is a must-read for families as it will alert them to some of the harmful practices such as family blaming which, incredibly in this day and age, they may well encounter. The disease itself would challenge the most cohesive bonds between caring loved ones. So if a family like this one, eager to work together with treating professionals and to educate themselves, can hit such roadblocks, one hesitates to imagine the experience of families with less love, determination, and resilience.

This is also a must-read for even the best of mental health practitioners, so that they may more fully understand the entirety of the experience of what is often the primary support system of their client, and potentially their best ally in treatment.

The book also highlights systemic disparities between treatment of physical illnesses and mental illnesses in terms of both attitudes and resources. It illustrates as well the terrible consequences of some astonishing gaps in the training programs of some of the well-meaning professionals who end up dealing with clients with serious mental illnesses.

This author's daughter was stricken with a life-altering mental illness. When she turned to professionals, instead of help, she often came across harmful ignorance. She transformed these profound disappointments into glimmers of hope, for her daughter, her family and her community. This true story is especially pertinent to families with a mental illness, but it's relevance extends to any of us faced with difficult, isolating problems.