A closer look inside a broken system.
Hilary de Vries's writing about arts and entertainment has appeared in The New York Times for more than a decade, on topics from regional theater to female TV producers to a memorable guest essay about how mortgage foreclosures were affecting Hollywood. |
Her latest essay is about something much more personal: her sister, who suffers from serious mental illness. The piece is a harrowing account of how de Vries has struggled to keep her sister off the streets and how thoroughly government agencies and medical institutions have thwarted her. |
"To keep my sister from becoming one of the thousands of mentally ill homeless people in New York, I and other members of our family spent three years, 2009 to 2012, navigating the city's real estate laws, federal disability requirements and the state's health care system and mental health laws. It was a daunting, time-consuming and almost impossible task for laypeople." |
She was moved to write the piece after Mayor Eric Adams of New York announced a new mental health directive that she felt would make it easier to get help for people like her sister. It required overcoming the enduring stigma of mental illness. But in a way, that was the whole point of it. |
"Let's start talking about this," de Vries recently recalled thinking. "If people can say, 'Look, I've got a family member, and I'm struggling to keep them safe' — if more people can just put their hand up and say, 'This system isn't working. We tried, and our son is now wandering the streets. We don't know where he is,'" then things might begin to change. |
Before moving ahead, she consulted with her sister's psychiatrist and caseworker and with her own conscience and comfort level. Going public with her family's story was a risk for her and, she acknowledges, for her sister, for whom de Vries serves as legal guardian. Ultimately, she decided that it was more important to tell the truth, with the hope of helping other families in similar situations. |
De Vries, a novelist and screenwriter, said the essay about her sister is "part of a longer-term project about the fragility of the American family and the power of loss and memory." |
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