Find Your Fellow Travelers.
A companion resource guide for families navigating serious mental illness. This guide maps the gaps in the care system, shows you the specific places families fall through them, and details a model of care pointing at something better.
In immediate danger? Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US). It is free, and it is answered around the clock.
What's Inside
Locate the 4 Junctions of Care: Learn how to spot and navigate structural gaps in the system—like the transition out of the hospital, emergency room boarding, insurance ghost networks, and areas with no local psychiatrists.
Evaluate Your Care with 7 Key Principles: Use the core lens of the Open Dialogue framework (such as immediate help, family network inclusion, and tolerance of uncertainty) to measure the care you are being offered.
Practical Steps to Find Community: Get actionable advice on finding family support groups, leaning on people just one stretch ahead of you, and accessing resource recommendations.
From Inside the Guide
A preview: Four junctions to watch
Four junctions to watch
The transition out of the hospital
This is the junction Stephanie names first, and the one families are least prepared for. Discharge feels like the crisis ending. Structurally, it is a handoff, and handoffs are where things get dropped.
The risk here is measurable and it is large. A meta-analysis pooling 100 studies and nearly 18,000 suicides found the suicide rate in the first three months after psychiatric discharge to be roughly 100 times the global average, and found risk stays elevated for years afterward (Chung et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2017).
Within that window, the risk is front-loaded rather than evenly spread. A Danish study following national registers found two sharp peaks around a psychiatric hospital stay: one in the first week after admission, and another in the first week after discharge (Qin and Nordentoft, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005). So the first seven days at home deserve more preparation than any other part of the transition, and they are usually the days with the least support attached to them.
Discharge is not the end of the acute period. It is the beginning of the highest-risk stretch. None of that is here to frighten you. It is the reason the two lists below exist, and the reason it is worth using the days you have now.
List One · While they are still in the hospital
Things worth doing while they are still in the hospital. The stay itself is not dead time to be waited out. It is the one stretch where the whole care team is in a single building and reachable…
Keep reading — both checklists, plus the other three junctions, are in the full guide.
In immediate danger? Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US).
About Stephanie Greer
Stephanie Greer, PhD is a neuroscientist, co-founder of Akin, and the author of Many Pathways. Across Akin and Doro Mind, she has personally conducted about 290 welcome calls listening to families describe their journeys. She is training as a marriage and family therapist at the Wright Institute while continuing her Open Dialogue training through the Indico Institute.
Get your copy of the Fellow Travelers companion guide today.
About Doro Mind
Doro Mind provides comprehensive care for serious mental illness, built around the family rather than around the patient alone. Under the clinical leadership of Dr. Robert Laitman, we provide medication management, a dedicated guide for each family, family coaching, and coordination of care. Our model is designed around the power of continuity—staying with a family long enough that the junctions stop being cliffs. As one Doro Mind member shared: "Finally, people who really get it."