Approximately five years ago, my husband Ryan and I began experiencing a mental health crisis. We lived in rural Tennessee with our 8 children, including our son Lucas who has special needs and profound autism. Lucas’s needs never felt like a big deal when he was young. Yes, there were medical concerns we had to be aware of, and yes, he required extra supports and therapies, and yes, he didn’t sleep great, but all in all, he was a sweet boy who we felt honored to raise until…until he began going through puberty and that sweetness was replaced with extreme aggression, screaming, and anxiety, and we had no where to turn.
We lived in a community that was very rural, so rural that there weren’t any special needs ministries at the churches within a 30 mile radius. No accessible playground in town. No respite opportunities. No extended school year offered. And as our world became smaller and smaller, and as we dug in our heels and dealt with life, and as the isolation became suffocating, our bodies began to respond to the stress with panic attacks, weight loss, and insomnia that resulted in numerous ER visits—and the eventual realization that we had to do something. We could no longer live like this. We had to move toward resources, which we did in 2018.
These experiences in rural America, however, were not in vain. They led to the formation of a non-profit, The Lucas Project, which provides recognition, resources and respite for special needs families. They led to a book I have releasing this summer called Blended with Grit and Grace, stories about our life on the homestead. And they led to a really strange idea: an idea that perhaps a documentary was needed to dive deeply into the unspoken mental health crisis that many caregivers silently suffer through.