NOTHING TO HIDE: Mental Illness in the Family

Based on a travelling photo-text exhibit produced by the non-profit Family Diversity Project, this book features posed but casual portraits and candid first-person accounts of mentally ill people and their families. Beard and Gillespie (both licensed clinical social workers) present 44 families from a wide range of racial, educational, geographic and class backgrounds, as "mental illness knows no boundaries." Portraitist Kaeser's simple black-and-white photographs show the families involved, but are not stirring enough to catch the interest of casual browsers; much more revealing are the interviews. All the subjects here identify themselves as mentally ill, but the words they use to describe their conditions run from the clinical to the vernacular; some "consider worlds like 'nuts' and 'crazy' to be just as offensive as racial epithets; others use these words with a sense of humor." Some methods for coping with mental illness may come as a surprise, as one schizophrenic woman says, "When I told my mother about my voices, she said, 'Just listen to them.' So I would listen to them until they would go away." (Nov.)