Commentary: Mental illness was my family's secret — and America's great shame

In 2011, I began a professional and personal journey to understand my profession's abandonment of our sickest patients. I had been trained as a psychiatrist at an Ivy League medical center on the East Coast. Like most of my colleagues in my generation, I did not end up treating those with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. Also, like many people in my field, I had a personal connection to the disease that I kept to myself.

When I was 14, Merle, my beautiful and kind 20-year-old sister, developed schizophrenia. My older sister, Gail, eventually took Merle to the hospital in Philadelphia, our hometown. After two weeks of failed treatment, my parents promptly took her out.

To my working-class Jewish parents, Merle's mental illness was a