From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is my unsung hero, stories where one person reached

out to help another in a time of need. I don't know the name of my

unsung hero and here she was trying to encourage me that it was going to be all right.

Thank you. You will forever be my own sung hero.

Today's story comes from Barbara Romero.

When Barbara's son Daniel was around 12, his behavior became erratic and strange. Sometimes he would stay up all

night talking to himself. He was constantly getting in trouble at school. Barbara and her husband would later discover that Daniel had schizophrenia,

but his therapists, mentors, and psychiatrists could not detect that.

And none of the suggestions to modify his behavior were working.

From Barbara's point of view, most of the people in his life simply saw Daniel as a bad kid and her as a bad mother.

Barbara will never forget the day she reached a breaking point with his behavior.

It was November the 11th of 2005 and I was remember because it was Veterans Day and it was in my mind it was the day that we decided that we could no longer be apparent to our son.

So that day we made a decision to just maybe believe

that somebody else could do better than we could. So the authorities came and they picked

him up and they took him and it was like the whole

house got numb because it was so quiet and nobody knew what to say and so it took about I would say two days for us to find

out where he was and we finally found out that he was in a detention center that was

about three hours away from where we lived.

So I called them and the woman that answered the phone

was just trying to do her job and when I asked for him she said we can't give

any information on the inmates here and I said but I know he's. They just told us that they brought him there and she, again, just trying to do her job, maintained her situation. So I hung up the phone and I thought for a while and I composed myself and I called

back and I said to her, look, you don't have to give me any information on who is there.

...