Bookish Flights: Books, Author Interviews & Must-Read Recommendations · Kara Infante

Loving Someone Through Mental Illness: Grief, Resilience, & the Stories We Tell Ourselves with Sheila Hamilton (E205)

·32 min·3 clips

Sheila says the day after psychiatric discharge is a high-risk moment families are not warned about.

Kara opens gently. She sets Bookish Flights up as a conversation about books, ordinary life, and whatever season a listener may be in, with a book flight waiting at the end. Then Sheila Hamilton joins her. Kara introduces Sheila as a journalist, speaker, and author of All the Things We Never Knew, a book written from the wreckage after loss. The conversation stays careful. Kara asks about advocacy inside care systems, and Sheila keeps coming back to one plain, uncomfortable point: patients can question a plan. A second opinion can matter. She also names the harder part, which is how much that changes when psychiatric holds and inpatient care shift the power away from the person in treatment. Kara gives the answers room. Her question about resilience moves Sheila out of policy and into the morning after trauma. Sheila remembers the woman she was then: exhausted, unsupported, waking up with a nine-year-old daughter and wondering how to pay for life now. Survival was not inspiring. It was sticky notes on the mirror. Brush your teeth. Pack lunch. Look at the sky. Do the next small thing. No one showed up to take over the mortgage, the parenting, or the grief. So Sheila used the skill she still had: reporting. Journalism became a way to look straight at what happened without letting grief become another illness. Kara closes softly, speaking to listeners carrying grief, questions about mental health, or love for someone in crisis, and sends them toward Sheila's memoir and the book flight.

As heard by us

A warm, unsparing conversation about grief, advocacy, and the slow work of resilience.

Sheila Hamilton and Kara Infante spend the episode on loving someone through mental illness, and the conversation stays measured, candid, and grounded.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a bookish conversation about grief, mental health, and caring for the people you love.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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