Product Description

In this novel of family and redemption, a mother struggles to save her eighteen-year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of mental illness by forcing her to deal with her bipolar disorder. New York Times best-selling author Bebe Moore Campbell draws on her own powerful emotions and African-American roots, showcasing her best writing yet.

Trina suffers from bipolar disorder, making her paranoid, wild, and violent. Watching her child turn into a bizarre stranger, Keri searches for assistance through normal channels. She quickly learns that a seventy-two hour hold is the only help you can get when an adult child starts to spiral out of control. After three days, Trina can sign herself out of any program.

Fed up with the bureaucracy of the mental health community and determined to save her daughter by any means necessary, Keri signs on for an illegal intervention. The Program is a group of radicals who eschew the psychiatric system and model themselves after the Underground Railroad. When Keri puts her daughter’s fate in their hands, she begins a journey that has her calling on the spirit of Harriet Tubman for courage. In the upheaval that follows, she is forced to confront a past that refuses to stay buried, even as she battles to secure a future for her child.

Bebe Moore Campbell’s moving story is for anyone who has ever faced insurmountable obstacles and prayed for a happy ending, only to discover she’d have to reach deep within herself to fight for it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475543 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-28
• Released on: 2005-06-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This powerful story of a mother trying to cope with her daughter's bipolar disorder reads at times like a heightened procedural. Keri, the owner of an upscale L.A. resale clothing shop, is hopeful as daughter Trina celebrates her 18th birthday and begins a successful-seeming new treatment. But as Trina relapses into mania, both their worlds spiral out of control. An ex-husband who refuses to believe their daughter is really sick, the stigmas of mental illness in the black community, a byzantine medico-insurance system—all make Keri increasingly desperate as Trina deteriorates (requiring, repeatedly, a "72 hour hold" in the hospital against her will). The ins and outs of working the mental health system take up a lot of space, but Moore Campbell is terrific at describing the different emotional gradations produced by each new circle of hell. There's a lesbian subplot, and a radical (and expensive) group that offers treatment off the grid may hold promise. The author of a well-reviewed children's book on how to cope with a parent's mental illness, Moore Campbell (What You Owe Me) is on familiar ground; she gives Keri's actions and decisions compelling depth and detail, and makes Trina's illness palpable. While this feels at times like a mission-driven book, it draws on all of Moore Campbell's nuance and style.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
Hell, being black is hard enough.... Please don't add crazy. So writes Bebe Moore Campbell in her compelling new novel that confronts two taboo subjects in the African American community: mental disorder and homosexuality. The book is named for the three-day maximum period that a mentally ill adult can be legally held in a public health facility if she demonstrates a danger to herself or others. The novel tells the story of Keri Whitmore, a successful black businesswoman struggling to care for a teenage daughter with bipolar disorder, which causes radical mood swings between mania and depression. The fictional prose is not meant to offer an inside look at brain disease. Rather it presents a brutally honest and devastating account of a mother's love and the desperate degree to which she will go to rescue her child from mental illness. In doing so, Campbell exposes the woeful inadequacies of our current public health care system in treating such patients and introduces the novel's greatest value: its insight into the challenges faced by people who must care for such loved ones. Nevertheless, this noble effort is undermined when Campbell invokes slavery to convey the horrors of mental illness. Though poignant, the comparison seems forced, relying on overwrought passages about whipping posts and slave auctions. The metaphor clouds the novel's purpose, especially since the author seems to decide, by the end, that the best way to deal with a family member's brain disease is through acceptance rather than emancipation. The same cannot be said of slavery. Campbell also draws parallels between brain disorders and homosexuality to suggest that both issues must be dealt with more openly. Her point that both are unfairly stigmatized is overshadowed by the unsavory implication that being gay is a malady somehow akin to mental illness. The novel offers important lessons to family members about caring for the self and seeking the support of others. And yet Campbell's main character is overly ambitious, much like the book itself. Keri seems more like a wonder-mom with an endless supply of time, energy and patience than a desperate mother on the brink of collapse. She not only cares for her manic daughter but runs her thriving business, strokes the ego of her workaholic exhusband, counsels her boyfriend's gay son and advises a drug-addicted ex-prostitute. Then again, Campbell has taken on ambitious aims, which she accomplishes with some success despite the novel's distractions.

Jeanne Hamming

From The Washington Post
The title 72 Hour Hold will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with treatment options for the mentally ill. It refers to the three-day period immediately following an acute episode, during which a person with a mental illness can be held, evaluated and treated against his or her will. In her new novel Bebe Moore Campbell makes the ordeal of living with such a relative painfully real as she guides readers through the hell of a child's disintegration. In the process she presents a powerful case for the universal acceptance and comprehensive treatment of mental illness.

Keri Whitmore is an African American who owns a designer resale clothing shop in Los Angeles. She lives with her daughter, Trina, in the upscale neighborhood of View Park. With a mother's vast pride, she looks forward to Trina's attending Brown University. Accustomed to success, she expects success for her daughter. When Trina, almost 18, clings to her mother like an infant, Keri remains upbeat. The girl is in treatment for bipolar, or manic-depressive, illness. She's taking her pills and attending daily individual and group counseling sessions. She's learning to care for herself and to cultivate the discipline her illness requires -- a good night's sleep, no caffeine, alcohol or drugs, and strict adherence to her medication regimen. If she starts to flounder, Mommy is close by.

But the episodes continue, and once Trina turns 18, Keri is legally powerless to insist upon treatment. Trina subverts her progress by running off with drug addicts and "cheeking" her pills instead of swallowing them. Alternating between little-girl sweetness and bruising attacks that leave Keri depleted, she escapes into the night of her illness. Time and again, Trina is lost, and a desperate Keri tries to follow her.

After seemingly endless journeys through a maze of police interventions and three-day hospital stays, Keri turns to a group of white radicals for help. They operate their own version of the Underground Railroad -- a series of safe houses and clandestine night journeys for parents willing to kidnap their children in a quest for effective treatment. Bethany, a mother Keri knows from her support group, explains it this way: "You got a radical problem, you need a radical solution." A skeptical Keri replies, "When radical white people get tired of being radical they get to be state senators, or they write books, or if push comes to shove they can move to Oregon and hang out for thirty years until the FBI finds them. Radical black people get killed."

Campbell's likening of the mind shackled by illness to the body shackled in slavery strikes a deep chord in African-American communities, where elders often compare contemporary scourges with the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. Somehow, the enormous suffering wrought by these twin evils should serve to protect their descendants from continued strife. Campbell draws on a collective memory of slavery's traumas -- the loss of identity and of control over one's own body, the grueling labor and constant brutality -- to describe a mind ravaged by disease and a family held hostage to madness. Perhaps slavery's most lasting legacy is the one Campbell never makes explicit but with which her novel is replete: the inability to protect children, to keep them safe and close, to guard them from harm. Keri's personal slavery is having a child she can't protect, and 72 Hour Hold has much to say about the anguish of parenting in a society that trumpets a person's legal rights at the expense of the person. Keri can't help judging herself, "If only I'd tried to work harder on my marriage. If only I hadn't been so busy."

Campbell often writes big-theme books. Her bestselling novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) explored the murder of a black youth in pre-civil rights America and the acquittal of his killers. What You Owe Me (2001) told the story of a black hotel maid's friendship with and subsequent betrayal by a Jewish Holocaust survivor. She's written about mental illness before, too, most notably in her children's book Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry (2003). Her casual conversational style sometimes belies the seriousness of her topics, but her ear for the language and rhythms of urban life remains sharp and true.

In 72 Hour Hold Campbell is particularly compelling in her depictions of substance abuse, attempts to self-medicate and the use of prisons as mental institutions. She seems to be saying to anyone who'll listen: It's biology and chemistry, get it? It's not about demonic possession or bad parenting. It's about accessible, affordable, ample and aggressive health care. To some extent, this is a novel for policymakers. It reveals the pain behind the statistics, the bewilderment of repetitive loss, the ebb and flow of hope against hope and, finally, the necessity of acceptance. It deserves a wide audience and the honest, open discussion that Campbell hopes to encourage.

Reviewed by Nancy Rawles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Loving A Stranger
Bebe Moore Campbell's latest novel, 72 Hour Hold, focuses on a
mother's frustration and desperation when dealing with a daughter suffering from mental illness. Earlier in the year, divorcee Kira Whitmore's beautiful daughter, Trina, was a high school senior and National Merit Scholar with a bright future ahead of her - starting with plans to study at Brown University in the fall. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, Trina changes and Kira innocently ignores a host of symptoms and warning signs. Trina's behavior eventually becomes more violent and erratic, spurring frantic 911 calls and numerous hospital visits that finally yield a diagnosis: bipolar (manic depressive)disorder. Their lives are literally turned upside down when Trina refuses to take the prescribed medication (mood stabilizers and psychotic drugs) and resorts to alcohol and marijuana use which only exacerbate and amplify her self-destructive behavior.

Like the good mother she is, Kira seeks and prays for a remedy or a cure, only to be told repeatedly that there is none, only lifelong treatment via prescription drugs. A weary attending physician does not offer much hope when he informs her with a look of pure pity that "mental illnesses can transform people. You may not be able to get back the daughter you had. You may, as the saying goes, have to learn to love a stranger," and wishes her good luck as a solitary comfort. She rebukes the advice and frantically learns all she can about the disease and its treatment via support groups and her own research with the hope that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

As hard as Kira tries to move in a positive direction, Trina's condition worsens. Her behavior modulates like an unsynchronized pendulum, from depression to mania with little to no warning. Kira reluctantly resorts to law enforcement to protect Trina from herself (often the subject of the attacks)and others. The rules are simple - if Trina is deemed a danger to society; she can be held against her will in a hospital's mental ward for the requisite "72 hour hold." Each time, Kira struggles desperately for an extension, but Trina "acts normal enough" and the requests are denied repeatedly - 72 hours is not, and never will be, enough time for the medication to stabilize the now rebellious, paranoid, legalized 18 year old adult Trina who hates her mother for wanting to "lock her up," thus the spiral into madness begins anew at each release.

At one point in the story, Kira is told, "when you love someone who has a mental illness, there comes a point at which you must detach in order to preserve your own life." But how can a mother ever detach from her child? Desperate times call for desperate measures and, Kira, having exhausted all legal avenues, resorts to an "intervention" which mirrors a covert kidnapping operation that has some disastrous and yet surprising results.

Campbell's story, albeit fictional, is an intense and compassionate testament that patients' rights often clash with what is best for the mentally ill. She paints a very realistic portrait of both the victims and the suffering loved ones charged with their care. Trina's descent into madness is realistic and painful to watch. The medical and legal system's bureaucracy is stifling. Kira's dilemma is heart-tugging. Campbell's skill as a writer is evident with an ingenious thread which portrays mental illness as a form of slavery and blends in imagery and metaphors from the African American slavery experience - references to shackles, plantation life and the Middle Passage. In addition, her usage of the Underground Railroad as a means of escape to freedom while looking toward the North Star as a symbol for hope and guidance was absolutely brilliant.

Campbell's work brings forth awareness because it holds a mirror to society's sometimes judgmental and condemning face. Throughout the novel, we see unkind strangers, impatient friends, and judgmental neighbors who spew unwanted, mean-spirited advice and cite unwarranted rationale for Trina's outcome, oftentimes blaming Kira for not spending enough time with her child when she was younger and other nonsensical causes. She also educates by sharing that a lot of mental diseases are hereditary/genetic and can be triggered by alcohol, drugs, or traumatic events. She challenges cultural boundaries by emphasizing how mental illness is a low priority in many ethnic communities, particularly African American, regardless of how prevalent and obvious it is within the communities. This is a wonderful, enlightening body of work told with the utmost tenderness and sensitivity.

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub, The Nubian Circle Book Club

"She sang as if she knew me, in all my dark despair"
I realize that this is a novel, but as Neil Diamond once sang "Except for the names and a few other changes, you could talk about me, the story's the same one". Having a family member who suffers from manic depression, I've lived through many of the episodes related in this book. There are the lies, the anger, the disappearances, and all of the other things that plague the narrator. One thing also remains the same: the love for the ill person can never be taken away, even though helping him or her causes terrible suffering and stress on the caretakers. It's not a perfect book by any means, but should be must reading for the caregivers of any mentally ill family member. They will see themselves in its pages, as I did.

OUTSTANDING!
I don't even know where to start with this book. It's a day to day story of a divorced mother who is trying to help her daughter deal with a mental illness. On top of that, she is African-American. Our culture typically shuns the mentally ill.

This book was written so well, that I started reading more on mental illness, since it does not affect me directly. I have read this book twice, and it was new each time.

The African American community (and probably the American community) needs to read this book to see what it's like to deal with an illness first hand, and everything that goes with it (the drugs, the way the government works, the support groups, what it does to a family).

Thank you, Ms. Campbell!