Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| While You Were Out | 2023 | Buy |
Meg Kissinger is an American journalist who spent decades as an investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her reporting focused on mental health policy, psychiatric care, and the failures of institutions meant to help people in crisis. She won numerous awards for her coverage and became one of the most recognized voices in mental health journalism in the United States.
Her 2023 memoir, While You Were Out, draws on both her professional expertise and deeply personal experience. The book tells the story of her large Irish-Catholic family in Milwaukee, where mental illness touched nearly every member across multiple generations. Kissinger writes about losing siblings to suicide and addiction, the guilt and confusion of growing up in a household shaped by these struggles, and how her own career covering mental health was inseparable from her family history.