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    How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening from 30 Years of Schizophrenia
    Unavailable
    How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening from 30 Years of Schizophrenia
    Unavailable
    How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening from 30 Years of Schizophrenia
    Ebook276 pages5 hours

    How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening from 30 Years of Schizophrenia

    By Margaret Hawkins and Carolyn S. Spiro

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Margaret Hawkins spent her girlhood dazzled by her vivacious, high-achieving sister, Barb. Younger than Barb by eleven years, Margaret saw her sister as the star of her family. And no wonder. Barb's high school years were filled with achievement inside and outside of the classroom. After college, Barb married a charming young professor, Karim Shallal, and embraced living abroad with him, when he was offered a full professorship at Basra University in Iraq. That was in 1971.

    In three years, everything changed. As Margaret Hawkins writes in her new book, How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening after 30 Years of Schizophrenia, "On a promising day in 1974, my family's life blew up. That was the day my beautiful, bright, and very American older sister returned from Iraq. Something had changed during those years she was gone, and the Barb we knew never really returned. That Barb had vanished, and though her husband tried to bring her home, she was already gone."

    Unimaginable as it might seem, for the next 32 years Barb went undiagnosed and untreated. How We Got Barb Back recounts the story of those years and the steps Margaret Hawkins took to bring her sister back from the depths of crippling mental illness. This story of sisterly love is both full of surprises and profoundly inspiring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Wheel
    Release dateSep 1, 2010
    ISBN9781609252861
    Unavailable
    How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening from 30 Years of Schizophrenia

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    Reviews for How We Got Barb Back

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    • 4/5
      The story of Barb Hawkins's life is nothing short of extraordinary. Barb developed schizophrenia in her early 30s, and became incapable of leaving her home. Her father, an overbearing control freak with a paranoid fear of modern medicine, refused to seek help for his daughter. The result was that Barb Hawkins lived trapped in her family's home for thirty years without treatment. It was not until Barb's father's death that she received any help. When their father died Barb's sister Margaret (the author) assumed guardianship, and for the first time was able to seek treatment for her sister. This is a tremendously sad story. It was astonishing to me that Barb's father was allowed to do this to his daughter. His actions seemed to me to amount to criminal neglect. The author was unable to deal with her father's issues, and essentially washed her hands of the situation until his death. Still, the family did have to appear before a judge at least once to assume guardianship, and I was shocked that the judge did nothing to help. By the time Margaret was able to take over her sister's care everything had to happen in-house, as it would be too traumatic for her to leave after thirty years. The stresses of arranging this sort of care, and the financial toll it took, show that even once Barb's father was gone there were no easy answers, and there was no simple solution. By the end of the memoir Barb has experienced some improvement. She is willing to spend time sitting on the porch, for example. The tone is meant to be hopeful, but I was never able to separate that from the sadness that comes from knowing that so much of Barb's life may have been needlessly wasted, literally holding her prisoner. This book provides an interesting look at how schizophrenia affects a family, but it is difficult to forget the fact that so much could have been mitigated if Barb had been allowed treatment decades earlier.