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

Chris and I have been greatly enjoying and getting a lot out of the emails and messages that

you've been sending us. And today I wanted to share a couple episode ideas that folks have sent us that I think are actually really great.

One person wrote in and said,

I've always been curious about identifying and treating mental illness early on.

There's little literature I can find about this.

What might you notice in your child from a very early age? Yeah, I actually have a couple episodes planned over the next few months where parents are going to talk about the signs in early stages

of their child's prodromal or early illness, how that developed, and also some wisdom and thoughts

for parents and families who might be dealing with that kind of thing.

Another excellent idea we got from a listener is this.

My episode's suggestion is a story that explores how psychiatric disorders affect families and intimate relationships.

Maybe a future episode might include a couple that explains how they deal with mental illness

in their relationship. Yeah, I think that's a great idea, and we're definitely going to explore

that here in the next few months. So thank you for those two ideas, listeners. And again, we really enjoy getting emails,

what you like about Back from the Abyss, suggestions for stories, creative but kind criticism,

anything that you'd like to share with us. And you can do that through the BFT website,

BFTA podcast.com, or through my website, Craighecockmd.com.

In this story, Annie tells her journey of starting off as a happy carefree child,

until the tragic suicide of her mentally ill father when she was nine years old,

to then pretending for years that she was just fine,

by overachieving and smiling and reassuring others, but all that time falling deeply and secretly into the two loves of her

life, alcohol and cutting. For a time, these extremely powerful coping strategies worked for

...