Accidental mental health advocate and unrelenting Jewish mother Debbie Feit is the author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) as well as numerous texts to her children that go unanswered. She is currently at work on a novel whose completion she is starting to fear may also be fictitious. Her features, essays and humor pieces have appeared in Insider, SheKnows, Parents, Bride’s, Delta Sky, Slackjaw, Points in Case and The Belladonna, as well as on her mother’s bulletin board.
From 2006-2010, she ran the now defunct site, Our Special Kids, a resource for parents of kids with special needs that featured an advice column, book reviews, celebrity profiles and a sense of camaraderie often found in the therapy waiting rooms Debbie frequented when her children were young. Both were diagnosed with apraxia of speech and she spent six years driving one or both of them to speech therapy several times a week.
Her need to advocate for her kids continued when her son was diagnosed with multiple psychiatric diagnoses while still in elementary school. Her efforts to get him the proper help included dozens of medications and almost as many mental health professionals spanning across four states. Today, he is a college graduate, working in his field of choice—helping kids just like him. Debbie works to help parents just like her by writing about her experiences and responding to the many messages she receives through social media.
When she’s not advising someone about the benefits of fish oil or trying to stave off a panic attack while revising her manuscript, she can be found writing about mental health, her life as a writer, and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram and Twitter.