elisabethel

Author: elisabethel

I'm a single Quaker mother of two young people with strong opinions and quick wit. One of the two - I'll call him Martin here - has been diagnosed with bipolar I and what has been called Asperger's, high functioning autism. His younger sibling - alias Pete - has anxiety and depression. I also suffer from anxiety and depression, though much less so with medication. This blog is about family life shot through with Quaker values, quirky humor, and mental illness. I have written two semi-fictional books about my travels through life with my own, and later my own and my children's issues with mental health, and I am getting ready to publish them. This "blog," which has always been pretty light on blogging, will become more like an author website at that point, though I may continue to post from time to time.

October 18, 2017March 17, 2019elisabethel

pills in fires and floods

After several weeks of hearing about one disaster after another – the hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico and Florida – and now waking for a week and a half to skies full of smoke from fires burning to the north of us, I started to wonder about mental health in a disaster. Not […]

October 17, 2017elisabethel

About

I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was eight years old, when I made my first attempt at writing one by penning thirty hand-written pages (with illustrations) about a boy who found meaning when a multi-hued collie entered his life. I’ve been working on various sorts of stories ever since, but it’s only recently […]

September 2, 2017March 17, 2019elisabethel

Something Novel

I’ve spent the last two years intensely focused on writing a novel about a family coping with mental illness. This is a topic that I know about intimately both from the family situation I grew up in and now as the parent of a “child” with bipolar disorder (he’s 21 now). One thing that […]