Kimberly's Publications
"If you’ve ever felt defeated, guilty, hopeless as you struggle to find help for your child or loved one, this book is for you. You, the parent of a child who is “not like all the others.” A parent who loves their child, but feels powerless to help them. Someone who has no answers for “how this happened to my child.”
- Gayle, Verified Purchase on Amazon
No One Told ME:
What Every Family Needs to Know About Mental Illness in America
Navigating the mental health system in America can feel overwhelming, isolating, and often impossible-especially when you're fighting for a loved one. In No One Told Me, a mother shares hard-won insights from the front lines of advocacy, caregiving, and crisis response. With honesty, urgency, and hope, this mini book explores why the system isn't "broken"-it was never truly built to support healing.
This guide offers an unflinching look at the history and reality of our nation's mental health care, the criminalization of mental illness, and the daily challenges families face when seeking treatment, housing, and long-term care. More importantly, it shines a light on what is possible. Change is not only needed-it is happening. And families can be part of the movement.
Whether you're a parent, caregiver, advocate, or ally, this book will equip you with:
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A foundational understanding of why the system fails families-and how to reframe the narrative.
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Encouragement to take small, meaningful steps that lead to lasting change.
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A roadmap to get involved in policy, advocacy, and public education.
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Stories of resilience, connection, and transformation.
No One Told Me reminds us that we are not alone-and that together, we can create something better. Because change is possible. And it starts with us.
“This is an essential book for families, clinicians, advocates, judges, law enforcement, policymakers, and anyone who wants to understand what serious mental illness does to a person, a family, and a community when care arrives too late—or not at all.”
Xavier Amador, Ph.D.
Author of I Am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help!
The System We Never Built
SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESS, CRIMINALIZATION, AND THE FIGHT TO CREATE REAL CARE
When severe mental illness enters a family, we are told there is a system of care waiting to help. But what happens when that “system” is actually a maze of disconnected hospitals, courts, jails, shelters, crisis services, and programs—each standing alone and waiting for someone else to take responsibility?
The System We Never Built begins with one mother’s deeply personal journey through that maze. After years of fighting to help her son through severe mental illness, homelessness, hospitalization, incarceration, and repeated psychiatric crises, Kimberly A. Bowman asks a larger question: What kind of system allows this to keep happening?
Part memoir, part examination of America’s mental health system, and part call to action, this book explores how untreated severe mental illness becomes criminalized—and what it would take to build something better.
Readers will explore:
• Why families encounter a maze instead of a true continuum of care
• How severe mental illness becomes homelessness, incarceration, and crisis
• The devastating consequences of treating symptoms as behavior instead of illness
• Why families and lived expertise must have a meaningful voice in system design
• What treatment, housing, crisis response, continuity, dignity, and accountability could look like when intentionally designed to work together
The System We Never Built does more than expose what is missing. It challenges us to stop accepting fragmentation as inevitable—and begin intentionally building the mental health system America has never had.
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