Safe, Wanted, and Loved by Patrick Dylan

Difficult issues like involuntary treatment and police involvement also came up. I thought the book was really effective at capturing how frightening psychosis can be for loved ones who don’t understand what’s happening, especially if the unwell individual becomes paranoid about family members. The book also got into the family’s hesitancy around medication, even while they recognized the necessity for it. I thought there was a good balance of presenting the pros and cons of medications and weighing particular side effects against the benefits of the associated medication. There were also some more severe effects that necessitated stopping the medication. The issue of medication side effects came up at different points in the book, including people asking Mia if she was pregnant due to medication-induced weight gain (yup, been there, done that). Mia’s journey is a good example of the challenges so many people with mental illness face trying to get the right diagnosis and the right meds for them. It wasn’t until finally getting diagnostic clarification, which required going not just out of town but out of state, that she was able to find the right medication to keep her illness under control. Her treatment team’s approach with meds struck me as strange in a separate post, I’ll address the issue of doctors sometimes relying heavily on benzodiazepines to manage problems that those drugs don’t actually treat. The reader is taken through the trial and error process of finding medication that would be helpful for her. Once Mia did end up getting treatment, there was confusion about her diagnosis, which continued for much of the book. For people who haven’t dealt with this kind of thing before, this will likely be eye-opening, and for those of us who’ve been on the patient side of things, it’s interesting to see the family member perspective. The family then faced the issue of how to get proper care for Mia as the psychosis worsened. I thought the pacing of this was quite well done, hooking the reader’s attention at the beginning and then gradually filling in more bits of backstory to give a view of Pat and Mia’s lives beyond just the way they were affected by mental illness. The book then moved forward in time, with sections at the beginning of each chapter moving back in time to earlier points in their relationship.

The book’s powerful opening line is the author’s wife, Mia, saying “Pat, I am going to prison.” At that point, she was first demonstrating indications of psychosis.

Safe, Wanted, and Loved by Patrick Dylan is a memoir about the author’s wife’s experiences of mental illness, how that affected the family, and the difficult journey in the direction of recovery.