And i started mindsite news as the only National News site focused solely on Mental Health reporting. We did so to fill a void, but long before we launched guest today, Meg Kissinger was plowing that ground as one of the only reporters, the country working squarely on the Mental Health beat for 35 years at the milwaukee sentinel, meg covered the workings and mostly the failing of what we euphemistically call the Mental Health system in this. But meg also about those issues on a much more personal as well talk about today her memoir while you were out tells the story of growing up in chicago suburbs with Seven Brothers and sisters, a charming but manic father, a brilliant but melancholic and often absent mother and messy pile of secrets. Welcome, meg. Its great to be with you and talking about amazing work. Thanks, rob. I cant think of anybody i would rather be talking to about it than with you. So its privilege. Thanks much. I have to say, what i love about this book is that you, the keen eye of a reporter the storytelling chops and wit that may be part of the kissinger dna and the passion of someone who has looked squarely at human and institutional failure and wants to expose it. So lets start here. What prompted you to write this book, to dig through and air your familys story and did that flow from your work as . A Mental Health reporter . Yeah, i its always been in me. You know, i as as the fourth of eight kids and as you wisely point out, you know, a boisterous clan. We i was always the nosy one, the monkey in the middle you know, so curious about what was on in my family. And we not talk about it. So that only maybe even more curious and and you know when tragedies befell us they did in i was always a one, in the middle so curious about what was going on in my family and we did not talk about it. That made me even more curious and when tragedies befell us and they did in, that piqued my curiosity of the more and i was naturally inclined than to ride stories about how people with Mental Illnesses suffer in this country and are not well attended. That provided me with a lively career for quite a long time. It was very fortunate to work at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which is a regional newspaper, editors were squarely dedicated to riding about people less fortunate and it gave me all kinds of support in terms of the budget to go places and the time to ride the stories in great depth. So i was very grateful for that but i realized years and years into this that kind of the most intense story was the one i never really examined thoroughly and that was a story of my own family. If i was going to do that. Need to do that in the same way that i would approach an investigative story that i would ride for the newspaper, which is a scary undertaking. It meant that i had to file a freedom of information requests for my brother and Sisters Police records. I got their medical files. It was a mystery waiting to be solved, but it was a very personal mystery and i was more than a little nervous about doing it. By you and your siblings to help and protect each other. And i think maybe the best way. Give a sense of your family and your delicious storytelling would be for you to read a couple of passages from that first chapter of your book. Could you do that for us . Sure, i shall. Thank you so much. So this is very beginning of the book and. Then im going to skip down to the last section of that same first chapter. So it starts out saying, when we were little, my sister patty and i to pretend that ferocious tigers lurked in the space between our twin beds, just waiting to rip us to shreds. They stalks us at night with their sharp fangs growl, yelling and snorting and licking their chops. Geppetto were fingered down to low and snap. Theyd chop it off, clean to the bone. We bounced from one bed to the next, shrieking as we flew through the air pipe down to earl. Come in there and beat to a bloody pulp. My mother would yell from her down the hall. The invisible tiger scared. Our mother did not. Watch this. I to patty as i leaned over the of my bed and slowly wiggled fingers down into the pit, shed poke her curly little head over the side of her bed and stare the big black hole nervously wheezing as she waited for one of the tigers to take the bait id squeeze my eyes shut, imagining the hungry skulking towards us the smell of their musky fur, filling my nostrils i feel the thumping of my heart in the middle of my throat. I said, pipe down. My mother would call out weaker this time. We knew she didnt have the to beat us, much less any bloody pulp. My mother, an erstwhile debutante with a genius iq, now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies blistered bottoms, wiping snot off our faces, plastering our colleagues with her spit, and dripping warm medicine into our oozing, infected canals. She stuffed lunch bags with Peanut Butter and potato chip as she helped us conjugate out, latin verbs folded while she quizzed us and multiple occasion tables and typed our turn between bouncing a baby on our lap and ironing our uniform. My mother was my mother. Oh, im sorry. Her own mother was. And she had no sisters. So it fell to my mother to raise her eight children, more or less by herself, while my father was out of town most of the week business my father, bill kissinger, we called him homer. So the advertising space to companies that manufacture tranquilizers and other socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals to harried of the baby boom business was brisk, especially in our north shore chicago neighborhood, where women, a great number of them irish catholics, like my mother, were expected, fill the pews with as many childrens they could bear, whether they had the stamina or not. Our fathers sudden changes and our mothers and our mothers melancholia made us tense like little deer teetering the forest vulnerable and unprotected. We fretted that the tigers could bounding toward us at any. Or maybe they creep up on us slowly slinking through the grille, slinking through the glades, as tigers often do. We wanted to be good. We tried our best to be brave. Once we dared ourselves to fall asleep, Holding Hands over the tiger pit. But we never stopped worrying about the beast that we imagined swirled between our beds. We knew we were no match for them and we dreaded the day that they would rip us apart. It seemed like only a matter of time. Indeed, one day the tigers did come. Do you want me to finish that little end of the chapter. Sure. If you feel if youre. If youre up for it, that be great. Sure. Okay. They were not real tigers, i think. They were not real tigers, of course, but a menace as ferocious with a power just as deadly. They and clawed until they made mincemeat each of us all. Some in our family were devoured head to toe. Never to be seen again. A sister ripped to shreds and swallowed whole. Then, years later, brother snatched before very eyes. We could see it happening. We just couldnt do anything to save him. Or maybe we were too scared to try. Those of us who were left to hide. But the beasts were relentless. Just when we thought that we were free, no one would spring toward us. And then another. And another. Eventually we were all mauled and mangled. No one escaped unscathed in time. We learned that if we were to survive, we couldnt just shiver under our covers the way patti and i used to. Wed each have to figure out a way to fight back, wrestle those to the ground. Parliament to submission once and for all, if not that surely come back and get us to. Wow. What a great way to start a book. So thank you. Looking back on life in, the kissinger household, what would the signs even in retrospect in retrospect that things were not all good with your mom and dad and with some of your siblings. And what strategies did you and your siblings devise to deal with some of the chaos and confusion that seems to have reigned. Yeah, i think first picked up on it, you know, as. Five year old. My mom who was really, you know, loving, wonderful person but she could be very spacey. She she would often kind of drift off. And it was hard to kind of get to her. She was quite busy. You know, it was just outlined. She had eight kids and 12 years and a husband that was gone a lot. But how we would cope with that was, you know, we lean on each other, think we would look to each other for comfort. My sister patty and i roommates that, we were you know, we would allow ourselves sleep. My mom didnt have the bandwidth to, you know, attend to us too much. She did read to us each night, which i loved. But, you know, we didnt have there wasnt we have the full opportunity to get right to sleep every night or so. We kind of did that for other. And then as we got older, you know, and things were more apparent that there was trouble within, we just again, we tried to kind of find comfort with each other. You know, where i grew up was really an enclave of very big families. You know, being catholic. And and in the neighborhood that we grew up in was one of some wealth. So we had we had some privilege and there were just big old families and and and if you ran out of a brother and sister, there were, plenty of families down the block with of spare brothers and sisters. So we all kind of these families kind of melded together and im sure i know as an adult, i know that were a lot of those families were also struggling with alcohol abuse or Mental Illness. So we looked to each other yeah. As you had to i guess you write a lot about secret in your family some of which you didnt figure out until decades later as you were writing the book. For example, you had an uncle, all you knew about him or, thought you knew, was that he was a pilot who died during World War Two. Us what you learned about him and other pilots in training. Yeah. Rob, this blew me away. So this was. Was my fathers older brother, jack. And we imagined or i think we just assumed that was killed. And we knew he had died during World War Two and that he was a pilot. So i think we connected the dots and assumed that he was killed someplace in germany or japan, you know, violently. But what i and again, my parents and my dad never talked about it and neither his parents. My and grandpa did. They they lived with us off and on for some time. We were young and all we knew about uncle jack was we said a prayer for him every night when we would say grace at dinner we would always include a shout out to uncle jack. Anyway, what i came to learn getting his army records. Was that he was killed in texas on american soil. Of course, in training and. And that it was they were so desperate pilots in the early going. This was in 1943. So the beginning of the american involvement, the war. And they would take these young guys and just put them up on these planes with almost no. And that was the case of my uncle who was scrambling to finish his Flight Training and went up on a saturday unsupervised. And i came to learn that. Over 50,000 young im assuming men although i was probably exclusively men in those days, 15,000 die in training. Thats just staggering to me. And its a story that is not very widely known or told. So that was one secret, you know, another was on my moms side, the family, my youngest brother was born when she was away at her freshman year of college. She was embarrassed that her mother was having a baby while she was afraid that people going to think was her because she was 18 years old. And if she was a little baby around the neighborhood that would make the assumption that it was her her baby. But anyway, my also named john was born with down syndrome, but my grandparents were never really accepting that and they really resisted the opportunity to get him into the care that he needed and. So that was a i think that was a great source of great sorrow and frustration for my mom. So they came into the marriage of them with these these these secrets and these and the sadness from within. And they had never really resolved those traumas when they began own baby production. So it was on shaky ground. This family was even launched. Yeah, i have to tell the piece about the pilots in training struck a chord with me because. My own father tried to fake his way into. The air force. He had, you know, he had bad vision. And he tried to be he tried. He volunteered, you know. He tried to volunteer, and he he tried to fake his way through the vision test, but to do so and ended up the in the army and it just it makes me realize that im glad that he i am glad he didnt he didnt make his way into the into a pilot, into the career as a pilot that he wanted. Right. We wouldnt be having this conversation and probably. Thats right. Thats right. So your moms hospitalization later . Well, i just i just gave away the punch line. I going to say there was a time there was a that you came downstairs and your mother was nowhere to be seen and your father loaded you into into the car and drove you off somewhere. Tell us about that. Yeah. So this was had just moved back from connecticut. My dad had started a bone. He another guy started this magazine thats still around. Its called physicians management. And it was intended to be of a business magazine for physicians and tips on how to manage their practice. But the the beauty of it was it was chock full of advertisements and this is in the early 1960s, 61, 62 and tranquil officers were coming on to the marketplace, fast and furious, milltown, the early versions of of prozac or i should say. Sedatives of anyway, the the socalled Ethical Pharmaceuticals which which meant that you got prescriptions for them and america was going gangbusters with pharmaceutical sales. So we moved down to connecticut so that my dad could manage the business in new york city and lived in a idyllic town of new canaan but it went bad for my father quickly and he began kind of have doubts about his Business Partner and the tension between the two became so much that he quit he ended up suing his Business Partner so there was tumult and we moved back in a hurry and my dad bought this house that my mother had not even seen. And it was not really to her liking anyway. She was quite frazzled and she had just had her seventh baby and i was going into first grade and i came down the stairs one morning and she was just gone. Anyway, we were not told she was. We had no idea. I thought maybe she had another baby. But the other, the other, the current was only about five months. So just didnt know, you know. I didnt know details at that stage of the game. Anyway, we were hauled off my sister patty and i to my uncles house in and it was an adventure. But it was a scary adventure because. We had no idea where the heck we were going or so we were there for. I dont really think we were even there very long. Rob but when youre five years old, three days or however long it was, seemed a long time. And especially when you dont know why youre there. So i came to learn that it was my mother was just being hospitalized for depression and would go back into the hospital. A few months later it was and just kind of almost like cinematically it was very week that president kennedy was assassinated. So, you know, america is mourning this horrible tragedy. I am a little first grader worrying about where my mother is. So it was a pretty intense time in my life and the life of america. Yeah. And that hospitalization of your mother would be followed by others and later by the decline of your sister nancy into into severe depression and to her death by suicide. Some years later, brother danny also took his own life. So how did your family navigate and talk these issues about the Mental Health problems that were, you know, smacking you in the face . Yeah, well, the short answer is we didnt so at first, i mean, ultimately we it could not have been avoided. But i will tell you about the night that my sister nancy died. So nancy was very troubled and again and that so were now were talking about the murder. 1970s. We didnt have the term they didnt to people as bipolar. I think now they would that would probably what she would be called but she had severe mood swings. She was very impetuous. She got psychotic. She she had hallucinations and delusions. Ive seen some medical records. It refers to her as having schizophrenia or schizophrenia disorder. I kind of think more. She was and i im not a medical professional by any stretch, but knowing what i do now know, having spent so many years, you know, writing about the Mental Health system, my hunch that she was really bipolar but had psychotic features nonetheless. She was quite ill and it was very disruptive you know, she could be violent. She could be very menacing. She could be very she was hilarious. And she was brilliant. But she could be a tough one to live with. So i steered clear her. I was four years younger than she, but we i just knew to to stay out of her path. And when she got sicker and sicker, i was a teenager and i was frustrated with her i was angry with her for taking up all the oxygen in the room, making my mom and dad so worried. You know, my dad was a very emotional guy and he would youd cry. He would be so worried about her and so and my mom was not one to show great emotion. I think maybe that went hand in glove with her depression and or more of a flat affect. But i knew that she was very worried about. So when nancy now she had many, many, many suicide attempts and some more public than others. But when finally did die and i, i go into kind of the mystery surrounded the actual, the day that she did finally die. And what i learned in writing this book, which really me and i wont spoil it, im going to add that as a little twist. But i will tell you this that the night that she died, my dad called us all into the room and he instructed, you know, in no uncertain terms, said if anybody asks this was an accident. So that seemed kooky to me like. Why would anybody in the world buy that . Everybody had known everybody in our parish, everybody our block, all of our friends knew that nancy had attempted suicide many times. They werent going to by my any kind of cockamamie explanation, that that it was an accident. But and my dad was to be mean. He worried he was worried that she would not be afforded a funeral, that the Catholic Church did not look thoughtfully or kindly on people who die by suicide. They consider that a a mortal sin. And you were not to be given a funeral or be buried on catholic grounds. My dad, one of my dads best friends, had a son who died the year before of suicide, and my