What do you do when someone you love is diagnosed with a debilitating mental illness? You can ask Emeline Bates, whose favorite aunt was taken from her home in France in the 1890's. Or Clemens Bates, her son, whose brother Truman was sent to the Vermont Asylum for the Insane in 1932.

Truman Bates was heading for a career in the Vermont granite industry until he began to hear, feel, and see things that no one else could. He was eventually treated for a newly labeled illness: schizophrenia. Decades later, his nephew Pat Bates was a typical senior of the Class of 1984. It was then that Pat's unlikely best friend, Dante Zuckerman, began to seriously worry that the depression Pat fell into that year would lead him to a life like Uncle Tru's.

While there is no one way for a family to navigate their way through the complexities of mental illness, how they do so is greatly influenced by both the time and place in which it occurs. Equally significant are the friends and community who provide the support needed for a transition to a new normal.