Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

This is the second of two stories about caring for adult children a severe mental illness.

Today, Dave and Laurie share their journey through the denial, the fear and grief and eventual

acceptance of their son's life-altering psychiatric illness.

It was a very moving experience to record with them. I am their son's

psychiatrist, and I've witnessed their profound pain firsthand, as we all have tried to work together

to find some measure of peace for their son. I also think their story contains a lot of hope and

wisdom for families facing the reality of an adult child with life-altering mental illness,

the death of one life path, and the grinding emergence of a new, completely unforeseen,

and at times frightening and even overwhelming life path.

Dave and Lori have largely emerged from this abyss, and they have so much to share with all of us.

All right, so the way that our son's illness manifested itself originally, everything was going very well in elementary school, junior high, high school, and college.

He was an ideal son. He was very proficient academically. He was musically inclined. And he also was really into sports as well.

And just very, very passionate about everything that he did.

And interestingly, looking back now, I think it was interesting that he was kind of the social hub in his little click.

And he was the one who got everyone together.

So that's where we were. He went off to college. And then things went

fairly smoothly through college. He spent five years down at CU and ended up getting two pretty

complicated degrees. So we thought everything was on track. Things were looking very promising for

him.

And then we kind of took a little bit of a left turn.

And maybe I'll let Lori talk a little bit about how that occurred.

...