There is a kind of hierarchy of expectations about who owes what to whom. Sometimes people have to do the emotionally counterintuitive thing and withdraw from the loved person. It's very, very difficult for a parent to withdraw from a child, for example. It seems emotionally right to give yourself over completely to your child, to do everything you can to cure this illness, to have no boundaries. Unfortunately, although their motives are good, parents who do this, especially mothers, often find themselves in trouble.
People have to learn to take care of themselves before they can take care of other people.
Having a mentally ill parent must be a terrifying experience. They're like children who grow up in wartime, or in violent housing projects. We were sitting on the floor watching television, and my mother picked up a pair of scissors, and she was going, 'Click, click,' inches from my face. The anger and sense of betrayal catches up with children later on, in adulthood. They really didn't have a childhood.