More thoughts on parents with ill adult children

Sometimes I feel that my readers are collaborators on my columns and blogs. They invariably e-mail me with perspectives and information I hadn't thought to include initially, and then I have the opportunity to incorporate those valuable additions here.

For example, after my recent column, When An Adult Child Is Ill, two readers offered insights I found especially interesting:

1) When an adult child is ill, and demands extra attention from his or her aging parents, siblings often suffer, too. Of course, adult siblings are likely to be helpful to a brother or sister suffering from an illness, and might feel guilty about feeling neglected (or feeing that their own kids are being neglected) by their parents when, after all, they're healthy, independent adults. But, as one parent of a mentally ill daughter wrote: "The issues of when to draw the line between helping and enabling can be very difficult, not only on parents, but siblings. After spending multiple years in helping [my daughter] stay alive due to her mental/emotional problems we realized that her sibling was unfortunately not getting the attention he needed."

Any individual's illness can throw an entire family's relationships out of balance, and family therapy is often helpful in moving through the anger, guilt, and conflicted feelings that can accompany illness.