The Missing Half

Nicole Drapeau Gillen writes as a mother and a Family-to-Family facilitator with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her argument is narrow and sharp. Decision-support AI for schizophrenia draws on the chart, the patient's self-report and the clinic visit. With anosognosia, a self-report records what the person believes, not what a parent saw at 3 a.m. Relapse builds in the weeks between appointments, and the family is the one watching then. She proposes that, with the patient's consent, a family member complete a short structured observation before each visit.

The same gap runs through dementia care, where the person losing memory is also the one asked to report it. A daughter who notices the stove left on twice this month holds data no chart has. Tools that promise a full picture of the patient are building it without the people who see the most. Families are not an add-on to that picture. They are the missing half.