Author Jacki Lyden to Receive 2021 Patient Advocacy Award

Joe Mazza

“Many of us who are family members of someone with a serious mental illness can feel like we are fighting with an elemental force,” says veteran journalist and award-winning author Jacki Lyden. “Mania or depression are simply stronger than you are.”

Lyden is the 2021 recipient of the APA Patient Advocacy Award and will deliver the Patient Advocacy Lecture at this year’s Annual Meeting. The Award, established in 1987, recognizes a public figure who champions the rights and needs of people with mental illness and substance use disorders. Along with her two sisters, she is the caretaker and advocate for a 91-year-old mother with bipolar disorder.

She is a veteran of NPR, where she was a host and foreign correspondent for over three decades, and a bestselling author. She is a 2017-2018 recipient of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Early in her career, she won the Grand Prize from the National Mental Health Foundation for a series on the incarceration of people with mental illness in Montana.

Lyden was nominated for the award by APA President Jeffrey Geller, M.D., M.P.H., which was approved by the APA Board of Trustees.

In an interview with Psychiatric News, Lyden said caring for a family member with a serious mental illness over many decades has been a task requiring fierce advocacy for the afflicted family member with doctors and the health care system, negotiating skills, endurance, and—not least—self-care to stay whole and healthy for what is a long-term job.

“We have been in this dynamic for six decades,” Lyden said of the relationship with her mother and sisters. “Sometimes the situation has gotten better, sometimes it has gotten worse. But it was the way life was always going to be. We are a loving family with multiple challenges. Countering the mental illness of a family member means supporting yourself and trying to push through and past what can seem like a tsunami of bad news.”

Lyden is the author of the 1997 bestseller Daughter of Sheba, a memoir of her mother, Dolores. Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times review of the book, wrote, “Ms. Lyden’s fierce, loving, and often tortured memories of her mother form the backbone of this impressive book, a book that creates one of the most indelible portraits of a mother-daughter relationship to come along in years, a book that belongs on the shelf of classic memoirs. …”

At this year’s Annual Meeting, Lyden will read excerpts from a book in progress, Tell Me Something Good, which describes six decades on the front lines as her mother’s mental health advocate through the prism of this pandemic year. She told Psychiatric News, “When I was little, my mother used to say to me, ‘Tell me a story, Jacki—tell me something good.’ ”

Dolores’ mental illness was flamboyantly manifest when Lyden was very young, in the 1960s. Like many, her mother would have countless hospitalizations and go through multiple diagnoses before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She recently celebrated her 91st birthday and still resides at home with a caretaker. Since leaving NPR and throughout the pandemic, Lyden has split her time between her home in Washington, D.C., where her husband, Bill O’Leary, is a Washington Post photographer, and the family home in Wisconsin.

All three of the Lyden daughters have had a hand in caring for their mother and the role has, in varying ways, shaped their lives. Lyden says her long career as a foreign correspondent may have been sparked, at least in part, by her mother’s fantasies when the daughters were young. Dolores imagined she was the Queen of Sheba bequeathing exotic lands to her daughters. To Jacki she bequeathed the land of Mesopotamia; Lyden would spend years covering the Middle East.

Today, Kate is an artist, and sister Sarah is an elder-care lawyer. “Our mother’s mental illness was the bonfire around which my sisters and I warmed ourselves,” Lyden said.

In the 1990s, Lyden was a correspondent in London for NPR covering “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Later she covered the Middle East. In 2001, she was back in Brooklyn, N. Y., where she was the first NPR correspondent on air after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and reported from Ground Zero. She was also a correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars there. Today, Lyden teaches and leads a number of writing workshops, including “Love Comes in at the Eye,” an annual workshop for memoir and first-person writers and podcasters in County Galway, Ireland. ■