A new book, Connected Care: A Practical Guide to Technology for Serious Mental Illness, aims to bridge the information gap for families caring for loved ones with serious mental illness (SMI). Written by Nicole Drapeau Gillen, a caregiver herself, the book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of emerging technologies that can improve care, reduce costs, and prevent crises. It is now available on Amazon.
Serious mental illness—including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder—affects an estimated 14 million Americans, with tens of millions more family members and caregivers. Despite the rapid expansion of digital health tools, no single resource has organized this information for the people who need it most until now. Connected Care delivers 42+ vetted digital tools, 60 pharmaceutical portals across 16 companies, 6 types of financial assistance programs, 10 AI use cases in psychiatric care, and 19 practical checklists, all explained in plain language.
Gillen's first book, Schizophrenia & Related Disorders: A Handbook for Caregivers, became an Amazon bestseller with a 4.9-star rating, highlighting the demand from a systematically underserved community. Connected Care addresses the second gap she identified: the technology available after diagnosis. Dr. Akira Sawa, Director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center, praised the book, stating it "successfully fills the potential gap between them with language that families can actually act on, without sacrificing accuracy."
The book covers a wide range of technologies, including pharmaceutical patient assistance programs and co-pay portals that can reduce or eliminate medication costs, passive sensing apps and wearables that detect behavioral shifts preceding relapse, AI tools used in psychiatric care, FDA-cleared prescription digital therapeutics, telehealth platforms, and legal rights technology such as psychiatric advance directives and insurance denial appeals tools. Notably, insurance denials occur at rates 85% higher for mental health claims than comparable medical claims, and the book provides strategies to fight them.
Connected Care also addresses health equity, acknowledging that families who access the best technology are often those who already know how to navigate the system. It covers AI algorithmic bias, multilingual telehealth platforms, culturally competent care resources, and financial programs for underserved populations. Maria Case, founder of Kompashion, noted, "My family spent ten years searching for answers for my mother's schizophrenia—ten years of wrong doors, language barriers, and a system that wasn't built for us. I wish Connected Care had existed then."
The implications of this book are significant. For leaders in business and technology, it highlights a massive market opportunity: the mental health technology sector is rapidly growing, yet most products fail to reach the families who need them. Companies developing digital therapeutics, AI diagnostics, or remote monitoring tools should consider how to make their solutions accessible to caregivers. For healthcare providers, the book underscores the need to integrate technology into care plans and to recommend resources like Connected Care to patients' families. For policymakers, it reveals a health equity crisis within the mental health crisis, where technology access compounds existing disparities.
Gillen is available for media interviews and speaking engagements. More information can be found at ResourcesForSMI.com.
