The Real Story of a Mental Health Crisis: One Family’s Experience with Mental Illness and the Fight for Change
Some stories need to be told not because they are easy, but because they are true — and because telling them might spare another family the same unbearable pain. That is the spirit behind lifeofwilliamforaker.com, the platform created by Mike and Phyllis Foraker of Colorado Springs, Colorado, to share their son William’s story and advocate for a mental healthcare system that works better for everyone who needs it.
A Bright Future, a Devastating Diagnosis
William Foraker was, by all accounts, a smart young man with a promising future. Then, slowly and then all at once, paranoid schizophrenia changed everything. Over the course of two decades, his parents watched their son struggle with severe psychosis, with delusions that felt utterly real to him — including a persistent belief that the CIA was following him. This is the real story of a mental health crisis not as an abstract policy issue, but as something that happens inside a family, at kitchen tables and in hospital waiting rooms and in the heartbreaking space between what a parent wants to do and what the system allows them to do.
Despite everything Mike and Phyllis did — every call, every hospitalization, every legal avenue they explored — they could not save William. He passed away on January 15, 2023, at age 44. He was their son.
A Family’s Experience With Mental Illness in a Broken System
What makes the Forakers’ story so powerful — and so important — is that it is not just a story of grief. It is a detailed, unflinching account of what it actually looks like for a family to navigate a fractured mental healthcare system over many years. Their book, Mental Health Crisis Based on the Life of William Foraker, co-authored by Phyllis and David Michael Foraker, presents the experience from multiple perspectives: family, law enforcement, and William himself. It documents not just the personal pain, but the systemic failures — gaps in outpatient care, the complex legal thresholds for involuntary treatment, the shortage of licensed professionals in many communities, and a broader infrastructure that too often falls short of what families and individuals genuinely need.
The book is told with raw honesty and compassion, and it has found its way into classrooms and law enforcement training programs — places where understanding the real human cost of mental illness can shape better responses and better outcomes.
Turning Loss Into Legacy
Rather than retreating into private grief, Mike and Phyllis chose action. They helped advocate for changes to involuntary confinement laws in Colorado, which took effect in recent years. They established the William Arthur Foraker Legacy Fund for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention through the Pikes Peak Community Foundation, an endowed fund designed to benefit adults over 18 living with mental illness. And they continue to use the platform at lifeofwilliamforaker.com to raise awareness, share educational resources, and sustain the conversation about what meaningful mental health reform actually requires.
Why William’s Story Matters
Every family’s experience with mental illness is different, but the themes the Forakers describe — love, exhaustion, confusion, institutional barriers, and the aching desire to do more — are ones that resonate deeply with millions of people across the country. By sharing William’s story, his parents are doing something genuinely important: making visible what is too often invisible, and making the case that the system must do better.
If you or someone you love is experiencing a mental health crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. Help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.