Now There are Genetic Counselors for Mental Illness
ADAPT is one of the first clinics in the world to provide psychiatric genetic counseling to people with a family history of mental illness
Victoria Maxwell was no stranger to mental illness when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and psychosis at age 25. Her mother had bipolar depression, and when Maxwell was a child she remembers her mom as anxious and depressed, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal. “I walked around on eggshells so I didn’t set my mother off,” she says. Soon after Maxwell received her own diagnosis, she was hospitalized for running down the street naked during a period of psychosis. She was eventually hospitalized three more times, and says she struggled to come to terms with the fact that she developed a mental illness like her mother. “When I was hospitalized, I really didn’t accept the illness,” she says. “It took almost five years for me to accept it.”
Maxwell, now 52, created a one-person show about her experience titled That’s Just Crazy Talk — A Story About Family, Secrets, and Stigma. She was performing her show at a research conference when she was introduced to Dr. Jehannine Austin, a genetic counselor and the founder of the ADAPT Clinic at the B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre in…
