Overview

Every Homeless Person Has a Mother challenges one of the most overlooked failures in mental health care: the systematic exclusion of families from treatment and recovery. Across the country, families watch someone they love disappear into serious mental illness, often exacerbated by anosognosia, a brain disorder that prevents a person from recognizing they are ill. Families are frequently shut out as frameworks like HIPAA are misunderstood or misused. Mothers' and caregivers' voices are too often disregarded, while their loved ones end up homeless, incarcerated, hospitalized, or trapped in repeated cycles of crisis. Drawing on lived experience, advocacy, policy insight, and emerging evidence around clinician-family collaboration, Jacqueline Janssen offers a compassionate, practical, and deeply hopeful alternative. Citing evidence that informed family involvement improves recovery outcomes, she proposes a model in which clinicians and families work together-not in blame, but in partnership-to reduce relapses, lessen suffering, support recovery, and help prevent homelessness. Part memoir, part advocacy, and part call to action, Every Homeless Person Has a Mother gives voice to families too often left unseen while offering tools, stories, and strategies for earlier intervention, recovery, and human connection. This book is for families, clinicians, advocates, policymakers, and anyone searching for a more humane and effective response to serious mental illness. Early reviewers have called it ""urgent.""

Full Product Details

9798994221921

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Of all the mistakes of psychiatry over this past century, the tendency to see families as part of the problem instead of part of the solution is one of the most egregious. Jacqueline Janssen makes a powerful case for correcting this error by ensuring that families are included in every part of the treatment process. This is an important and hopeful message that comes at a time when recovery is finally being understood as a goal for people with serious mental illness."" -Thomas R. Insel, MD, Author: Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, Former Director National Institute of Mental Health ""As a retired judge, I spent years working with people in crisis and conflict, who were embroiled in the criminal justice system when they belonged in treatment. Jacqueline Jansson's Every Homeless Person Has a Mother is both deeply affecting and urgently important. It reminds us that every unhoused person is someone's child, someone's family, someone whose story deserves to be heard with dignity and compassion."" -Marin County Superior Court Judge Verna A. Adams (ret.) ""Jacqueline Janssen's book makes a compelling case that clinician-family collaboration is not an added burden, but a powerful, practical strategy for improving outcomes for people living with serious mental illness. The book grounds its insights with real-world examples, and shows how collaborative care can reduce expensive cycles of behavioral health crises, incarceration, and homelessness. This aligns with the important forward-thinking work already taking shape in communities like Marin County, California."" -Todd Schirmer, PhD, CCHP, Director of Behavioral Health and Recovery Services, County of Marin ""Jacqueline Janssen has written an important resource that only could have been penned by a mother with lived experience helping her son. I wish this book had been available when my son had his first psychotic break. Despite the best intentions of professionals and programs, it is families that those who are sick and homeless must depend."" -Pete Earley, Author of CRAZY: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness. 2007 Pulitzer Finalist. ""Every Homeless Person Has a Mother is a powerful and deeply human reminder that behind every individual experiencing homelessness is a family who loves them-and a system that too often fails them. For far too many, untreated severe mental illness is at the root of this crisis. This book brings both compassion and urgency to a conversation we can no longer afford to ignore."" -Ann Corcoran RN, MSN, Executive Director, National Shattering Silence Coalition ""Jacqueline Janssen is a tireless advocate for families navigating mental illness and homelessness. In Every Homeless Person Has a Mother, she offers a deeply personal and heartfelt call to better recognize the role of family-especially mothers-in prevention, care, and recovery."" -Kevin F. Adler, Author of When We Walk By and Founder of Miracle Messages

Author Information

Jacqueline Janssen is an advocate for families affected by (no-fault brain disease) mental illness. She is the California Policy Director for the National Shattering Silence Coalition and one of the creators of the County Family Partnership Policy. A former board member of National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her goal is for Clinician-Family Collaboration training to be required for mental health care certification nationwide. Jacqueline is also an advocate for women's rights and was a nominated Changemaker for the White House's United State of Women. She holds a bachelor's degree from University of California, Berkeley and is a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Her writing is dedicated to mental health, family healing, and gender equality. She revels in family, writing, advocacy, and the art and adventure of traveling the world with her husband.

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