Jillian Amodio: How Our Family Navigates Life With A Child With A Mental Illness
An Interview With Stephanie Greer
You are not alone, those who don’t understand you or your situation don’t need to, there are plenty of us who will welcome you with open arms.
Living with and caring for a child with mental illness presents a unique set of challenges, triumphs, and insights. In a world where mental health is increasingly at the forefront of social discussions, the need for awareness, support, and understanding is more crucial than ever. Our families are on the front lines, experiencing the everyday realities that come with this journey. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jillian Amodio.
Jillian Amodio is a licensed social worker, adjunct professor, writer, and mother of two. She runs Moms For Mental Health, an online support and resource group that offers personal support and referrals for those facing mental health struggles. She also has experience running support groups for teens, youth, women, and LGBTQ youth.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?
I am a licensed social worker. I work in a clinical setting where I offer therapy to individuals, couples, and families. I also teach at Anne Arundel Community College in the Psychology Department, and I am a writer. Most of my work focuses on mental health, health and wellness, family, parenting, and sex education. I run a large online support group called Moms for Mental Health, and I am passionate about helping people find the beauty in their own existence. I have two children, a husband, a horse, a dog, and the most social hermit crab you will ever meet. I actually utilize my horse and my hermit crab in some of my therapeutic work. I grew up one of four children. I am a triplet and have an older sister as well. While I grew up parallel to my siblings and parents, I actually spent my childhood living with my beloved grandparents, about 15 minutes away from my siblings and parents.
Mental health struggles are not a foreign concept to my family. We have a family history of bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, and likely a few other things as well. As a child and teenager, I struggled immensely with anxiety and depression. I also have personal experience with disordered eating and fought a lengthy battle with Post Partum Depression, which truly had me believing that my children would be better off if I were dead. More about that period of my life can be found through the Boston Globe sponsored Podcast Turning Points, episode 304. While mental health is certainly not a new concept to me, I don’t know that anyone, regardless of background or experience is prepared for the challenges and heartbreaks that come with caring for a child struggling with mental illness.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I don’t think I have a favorite life lesson quote. But there are a few that have always resonated with me. Be yourself, everyone else is already taken has always felt so powerful to me, and it also couples nicely with comparison is the thief of joy. Both in my personal life, and in my work as a mental health professional, I see the impacts of discounting our own worth, and losing ourselves in comparisons to others. I also like to remind my children and my clients that we get to live our own lives, not someone else’s so rather than wasting time comparing our existence to others, let’s focus on what we can do to make our life the best it can be.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you share with us the moment you realized your family’s journey was going to be different due to your child’s mental illness, and how did this realization transform your approach to family life and parenting?
When you finally come to the realization that your child is struggling with mental health conditions, it can feel really isolating. Regardless of how much you have been doing right, you tend to question if you are to blame. This is even more complicated for a mental health professional. This is what I do for a living! I should be able to fix this! But the reality of chronic mental health struggles is that there is no finish line, managing them is a life-long marathon. Sure you sometimes get a break to catch your breath, but the work continues on.
Was there a turning point for you when things started to change for the better? Can you please share a story?
We have been through just about every intervention imaginable including therapy, medication management, intensive outpatient, skills camps, parent training, and residential programming. Things started to change when we had a clear diagnosis which can sometimes be difficult in young children, and when we finally found the right combination of medications.
Navigating mental health challenges can be taxing for the entire family. Could you discuss the support systems that have been most effective for you and your child? Who are some of the important people in your life who have been on this journey with you? How have they either helped you or made things harder?
Having a child with special needs and/or severe mental health struggles takes a toll on the health and well-being of the family as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that good times can’t be had. There have been times when I felt like the impact of mental illness on our family would destroy us, but our family has refused to let that happen. We continue to show up for each other and do the next right thing. I lost many friends along the way but fortunately, we have many other supportive friends, neighbors, family members, and colleagues who support us and love us without expectation or judgment.
The group I founded, Moms for Mental Health is a huge source of comfort and a safe haven for me as well. I started this group over five years ago. I knew what it was like as an individual who has struggled with things like eating disorders, anxiety, and postpartum depression. I also knew what it was like to parent a child who struggles with their own mental health issues. I needed, the community needed, a place to be safely understood and supported. I had always felt like mental health was so stigmatized and almost shameful to talk about in a lot of places. Not all friends and family understand what we are going through. Sometimes it feels like you have to tiptoe around who you are allowed to talk to about this kind of thing. If you talk about it in mom’s groups for instance, you will get some supportive feedback, but often you will get feedback that is really judgmental or unkind.
Finding the right therapy for our family has also been crucial. I’ve been working with a DBT-C therapist and much of the work is with the parents. It’s labor-intensive and hard work. From the very beginning, I’ve been open and vulnerable about the fact that while I love my child fiercely, the strain of mental health struggles sometimes makes it feel so hard to be able to enjoy them and that makes me feel like a miserable failure of a parent at times.
I questioned….What type of parent doesn’t enjoy being with their kid? I had to learn to speak to myself with compassion. What type of parent? A tired parent, a parent who’s doing everything they can and it’s still not enough, a devoted parent, a good parent, a worn out parent, a soulfully exhausted parent…. That’s who.
One of the things we’ve been working on in sessions is choosing to “have fun” with the child even when (especially when) you’ve forgotten what that feels like, and doing things together to fall back in love with parenting. One thing I did recently to foster this is sign my child and myself up for a 20-week foundations ballet class.
Having supportive people around us helps quiet the negative talk and reminds us that parenting is not perfect. It’s not about making a show of perfection, it’s about taking each day as it comes and creating memorable moments with the pieces we’ve got. Learning to find love and joy in the reality you’ve been given is a lifelong process and it’s fueled by a fierce desire to live through a lens of unconditional love.
Things that make it harder are judgment and unkind words…. saying we just need to be more strict, less strict, more patient, less patient, and generally other advice from people who have no real concept of what is going on in our lives or the lengths we are going to to support our family.
What does a typical day in your life look like, and how do you adapt daily routines to accommodate the needs of your child while also ensuring the well-being of the rest of the family?
There really is no typical day. We take each day as it comes. Whatever interventions we are involved in at a specific point in time are worked into our schedule. I will say that routine, structure, and clear boundaries and expectations are a must. They help maintain order and emotional regulation. My husband and I make it a point to spend time together just as a couple to continue nurturing and fostering our relationship. We also make it a point to spend time with our kids one on one.
We are starting to get to a point where we can incorporate more time spent on “fun” and less time spent on interventions, but that is always a fluctuating process.
What are 5 things you learned from your journey that you think other people navigating life with a child with mental illness would benefit from knowing?
1 . You are not alone, those who don’t understand you or your situation don’t need to, there are plenty of us who will welcome you with open arms.
2 . This is no one’s fault, there is no shame in mental health.
3 . Engaging in therapeutic interventions is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength.
4 . You must take care of yourself as a caregiver or you will burn out, self care is not selfish it is self-preservation (I love to be at the barn with my horse).
5 . There is joy to be found, even on the hardest days.
Stigma surrounding mental illness can often lead to misconceptions and isolation. How has your family confronted and worked to overcome the stigma associated with mental illness?
Through my work as a mental health advocate and my frequent discussion about mental health in the media, I make it known that we do not have to struggle in silence and mental health does not define a person.
Despite the challenges, families often find moments of triumph and resilience. Can you share a particularly proud moment or a breakthrough that your family has experienced in this journey?
There are moments of pride to celebrate every day. Every time a coping skill is used, every time accountability is taken, every time we make it through an outing or day with smiles instead of tears! There is no one defining moment of pride or triumph, every day has triumphs we just have to remember to focus on those more than the struggles.
Are there any books, podcasts, or other resources that have helped you understand or manage your condition better?
Look into your local support groups and local therapeutic resources. Even our local libraries have been a great resource. I love Boston Globe’s Podcast Turning Points as well which really does great work in destigmatizing mental health.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)
HA! Can I say Taylor Swift (I mean talk about lifting others up and focusing on self-love!)
Michelle Obama for her work with youth and her passion for education and health, Jill Biden for her incredible work in the intersection of education and mental health, and Alexis McGill Johnson (president and CEO of Planned Parenthood) for her support of sex education and reproductive health. As a sex educator myself (with a sex education book that is gender and disability inclusive coming out soon) I think the work that Planned Parenthood does is just beyond incredible.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://app.qwoted.com/sources/jillian-amodio
https://greatdogliterary.com/authors
Thank you for your time and thoughtful answers. I know many people will gain so much from hearing this.
About The Interviewer: Stephanie Greer, PhD is the Co-founder and CEO of Akin Mental Health — a company dedicated to guiding families on their journey supporting a loved one with mental health challenges like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and severe depression. Stephanie is passionate about this topic from her own personal experience growing up with a mother who struggled with bipolar 1 disorder and found a path forward to overcome the obstacles and live well. Stephanie’s professional experience includes a doctorate in neuroscience as well as design research roles at Hopelab and Apple. Stephanie brings this personal passion together with her world-class science and technology background to support families across the US in their personal journeys supporting loved ones with mental illness. To learn more about Akin Mental Health and join our community, visit us at akinmh.com.
