I Can't Make it O.K.!

About the Book

I CAN´T MAKE IT O.K.!  A STORY OF DEPRESSION, MARRIAGE, AND DISCOVERY is about the destruction that uncontrolled depression unleashes within families.  This is a true story about the author’s struggle to help manage his wife’s depression and his quest to understand its cause.  Examined are possible genetic connections that might link their children to an increased sensitivity to depressive illness and possible origins from his wife’s traumatic and dysfunctional childhood.  Whatever the cause, this illness tore their family apart as they struggled to hold together their lives and sanity as they searched for hope.  Hope is always needed, and, once gone, there is only despair to be endured--the everyday reality for families overwhelmed by depressive illness.  While the intent of this story is not to condemn all medical treatment or all therapists, it is critical of the over use of the medical model with the identified individual patient to the exclusion of family, who are also in need of help.  It is meant as an awakening for those who are in similar situations and an encouragement to demand from your community mental health service providers the help everyone needs.  I believe this story will resonate with experiences of other families caught in the crossfire of competing needs of the patient, psychiatrists, psychologists, and self.  Lastly, this story is for my adult children to increase their understanding and comprehension of what happened to our family during their childhood. A forward by Thomas C. Kneavel, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, addresses the tragic impact of depression on effected families. The author´s email is ron.hamlen@usa.dupont.com

About the Author

Ronald A. Hamlen, a Ph.D. Research Biologist with academic and industrial careers, is the author of numerous technical articles on plant pathology in scientific journals and textbooks. He has written this personal story to educate others from experience gained through his challenge of living with a spouse ravaged by uncontrolled depressive illness and through his struggle with the mental health community to obtain appropriate care for his wife, their children, and himself. He is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife, Sue Fuhrmann, in Elkton, MD.