A True Story of Faith, Family & Love

They say there's nothing more difficult than to lose a child. I can relate. I lost my son, Daniel, to schizophrenia when he was sixteen years old. The full diagnosis that came down eventually was schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type - a mental health condition characterized by periods of severe psychosis accompanied by manic or depressive episodes. When Daniel turned eighteen, he was involuntarily committed to the state mental hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. The doctors couldn't figure out why his condition did not improve; they tried electro-shock therapy and a host of medications, but nothing seemed to work. I remember the head psychiatrist telling me one day during a visit that Daniel would likely remain in the hospital the rest of his life…

What do you do with news like that? How do you pick up the pieces? Can such devastation ever be overcome? I happen to believe it can. Perhaps it was stubbornness on my part, or perhaps it was a stubborn faith, but if there's one thing that I can look back on and say, "I got that right," it would be that I refused to surrender to despair. Yes, I sometimes spent the night weeping, but in the morning, I got back on my feet. There was work to do. There was a son to love.

When I began writing the script for Let Me Have My Son, I had one goal in mind more than any other: I wanted to give my son a voice, to introduce him to a world from which he had been prematurely exiled because of severe mental illness. And then through the process of making the film, something remarkable happened… something I had not counted on. By portraying Daniel's struggles and giving him the dignity I felt he deserved, I discovered that I was not just telling his story, but my story as well, and that of millions of other parents and caregivers who, like me, are doing their best to cope with severe mental illness in their families. I had no idea how common it can be to feel alone in such struggles and carry throughout the day a numb, wordless grief that seems to have turned the world upside down. Don't give up!

Let Me Have My Son is not a documentary. Nor is it an attempt to promote the latest scientific breakthrough or miracle cure for the scourge of mental illness. It is something else: a dramatic feature film made for families who know how it feels to love someone afflicted by schizophrenia. More than anything, it is a heartfelt expression of the longing we all share as human beings to make some sense of our greatest pain — and to refuse to give up on those we love.