Book Giveaway: Losing Tim: How Our Health and Education Systems Failed My Son with Schizophrenia

This week our featured book is Losing Tim: How Our Health and Education Systems Failed My Son with Schizophrenia by Paul Gionfriddo.

In addition to featuring the book and the author on the blog, we will also be posting about the book on twitter, and facebook.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Losing Tim to one winner. To enter the contest please e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu and include your name and address. The winner will be selected Friday, October 31 at 1:00 pm.

Paul Gionfriddo’s son Tim is one of the “6 percent”—an American with serious mental illness. He is also one of the half million homeless people with serious mental illnesses in desperate need of help yet underserved or ignored by our health and social-service systems.

In this moving, detailed, clear-eyed exposé, Gionfriddo describes how Tim and others like him come to live on the street. Gionfriddo takes stock of the numerous injustices that kept his son from realizing his potential from the time Tim first began to show symptoms of schizophrenia to the inadequate educational supports he received growing up, his isolation from family and friends, and his frequent encounters with the juvenile justice system and, later, the adult criminal-justice system and its substandard mental health care.

You can also read the chapter “Tim Brings a Gun to School”: