This Stranger My Son a Mothers Story

by Louise Wilson

A mother recounts the first 20 years of her mentally-ill son's life

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography

223 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Lynette Lark · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brother has paranoid schizophrenia. The onset seemed to coincide with his 17th birthday (1973). (Of course, my mother believes that it was that one use of LSD that did it; but I disagree.) The last memory that I have of my handsome brother was when he showed up at my apartment in the winter of 1977. He just needed a safe place to stay. I noticed that he had a toothbrush in his pocket, a jar of instant coffee, and a jar of peanut butter and that his two front teeth looked sort of "mashed" in like he had been using his finger to push on them (because my grandmother used to always say, "Mash your teeth, Mark. Mash your teeth." because she thought he had buck teeth, but I disagreed. Mark was gorgeous (and wicked smart) until I saw him that night--he had definitely changed. All seemed okay except that he wouldn't eat anything I cooked. Instead, he mixed his coffee and peanut butter together and ate that, but he brushed his teeth before he went to bed (my grandmother again was a stickler for teeth brushing!). He went into his room and soon I heard him chanting so I got up to check on him. He had built a small fire in the middle of the carpet. I called my mother who sent money for him to take a Greyhound bus from Florida back to Connecticut where she had him hospitalized. So my last memory of my brother is dropping him off at the bus station in Tampa, Florida. Mark got better in the hospital because they gave him some medications, but the flip side is when he got better he was able to leave the hospital, and he never took those meds again.

Now here it is 2020, and I find this book at a garage sale. It's a short read and it's written in 1968; but, I figure, that's still in Mark's timeframe since he was born in 1956.

My takeaway from this book is this: The author's son, Tony, is troubled since infancy (Mark was not); the parents took him to all sorts of doctors, mainly Freudian psychiatrists (my mother didn't do that), who maintained that the problem with Tony was his environment, especially with his mother (which in Mark's case was true--it was his environment and it was due to our mother); these shrinks wanted to psycho-analyze Tony (seriously!!) and they semi-sorta believed that he could be "cured" once they got to the root of his issues (his mother). Well, Tony was not "cured"; he was never going to be "cured." This was a big, total waste of time and money (even in 1968, insurance was a bitch in that they wouldn't pay for this "nonsense"). Luckily, Tony's father was a heart surgeon and could afford it (Mark never had a father). Not to belabor this, Tony was finally sent to a group home where both of his caretakers were psychiatrists--at $10,000.00 a month--and where he remained and where he finished college. Needless to say, my mother didn't do that because she thought Mark was hopeless (he was not--she preferred to believe that he was dead.)

There is one line in the book that resonated with me and which I will paraphrase: Schizophrenia is "a soul continually at war with itself, without peace." Can you imagine?

[Randye Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Back in 1968, it was even worse for families of those affected my mental illness than it is now. The money, the time they spent - only to be told that is could all be solved by psychoanalysis, that it had to be the fault of the parents. Only at the very end of this book is the author/Mom finally introduced to the idea that her son's schizophrenia is a mental illness, not anyone's fault. Things are far from perfect now, but at least they are a little kinder to parents than this.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a true story that was both uplifting and sad. Uplifting in the way that this boy's parents were extremely dedicated to him and never gave up. They gave him unconditional love in it's truest sense. It was also sad that the poor boy was seriously mentally ill. This family has been changed forever. An excellent book! I read it all in one night, I didn't want to stop reading!

[Iamshadow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both a view into the past but also still incredibly relevant, Louise Wilson writes very adeptly about life with a son with schizophrenia. Tony's schizophrenia developed early, possibly he was symptomatic as early as infancy, but his parents didn't realise just how ill he was until Tony was about twelve. Incredibly gifted, intellectual and artistic, Tony's parents were told again and again that Tony's issues stemmed from being coddled by his mother, that he should be made to do 'manly things' with his father to fix them. It wasn't until years later, after Tony had been to at least three psychotherapists and spent years in a boarding school for disturbed boys that Louise found a specialist who tells her the truth: that Tony is a paranoid schizophrenic, and that nothing she or her husband 'did wrong' made Tony that way. The story ends with Tony living in a group home, run by a psychotherapist and his wife for young people like Tony. Tony is going to college, learning his fifth language, and thinking of finding a job. Louise ends with the hope that chemical developments will create a drug to help Tony and others like him, and allow them to live in the world. Decades later, readers will know that medication does help certain people with schizophrenia to live in the community, but that it's far from the magic bullet that doctors and scientists still hope to find.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a true story about a family with a very disturbed child and what they went through to help him and protect their other children. Written in 1968. At the end it left me wondering what happened to Tony especially after his parents died. (I don't know if they have died yet but if not they would be really old.) The book made me grateful for my "normal" kids.

[Vikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the true story of a mother who is raising a son who has schizophrenia and three other children. The copyright date is 1968. She was told by most all doctors that she and her husband were the cause of the boy's problems. I would love to know what has happened to this family.

[Kim Steiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives a fascinating foray into the devastating experiences of a mother as she struggles with her husband and son to find answers and treatment for her son's true condition (schizophrenia) in a period (1960s) when psychology and psychiatry was even less developed than today.

[KayLee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emotionally hard to read but very very good :)

[Alondra Calamaco]

this was a beautiful story

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schizophrenia refrigerator mother syndrome, but this looks oddly like Asperger's Syndrome to me, and I am not qualified to diagnose, but Aspergers would have been unknown and autism was, I believe, considered part of schizophrenia at the time. This book is frustrating in part because you can see the frustration of the parents, think of the techniques that would not have been available to them, sympathize with them, with Tony, and still wonder why, for example, they don't teach their son social skills, why the author seems to continually dismiss her opinion as only Tony's mother, dislike most of the doctor's diagnoses here, and wonder why Tony's parents don't start a community living project themselves. Much of these problems may lay in the time period, because community living was not considered, and of social conventions (Tony's family essentially agrees to not tell anyone, including his school where he went and no one inquires). It shows that Tony may have had tolerance for school but not the patience for home, and that everyone, including himself, was not sure why he behaved as I did -- and I suspect his mother may have adjusted her descriptions. She recites a detailed medical history for her son, remarkably so as it would have been ignored by doctors, but doesn't begin to talk about things that I might have considered schizophrenia until the last fifty pages or so, even though by then the diagnosis is well established in the memoir. This is an interesting, sad, descriptive look at how a family adjusted to a diagnosis and family therapy and then held their example up to try and help others. I believe Wilson's goal was likely to help other refrigerator mothers not blame themselves, but her account also leaves me wondering what might have been left out of the story. Our family speculated as to what Tony's modern diagnosis might be, and wondered if he ever returned to community living later when medical opinion changed.

[Karen Koppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A touching account of mental illness prior to the use of pharmaceuticals to help control the symptoms of schizophrenia. It was very sad that families had to separate themselves from their loved ones because of the devastating effect it would have had to have them live all together. The inability to control temper, actions, verbal abuse would have stressed out any family to the point that they couldn't function to raise their other children. This family was fortunate that they could afford to place their son in a safe environment with a loving caretaker instead of committing him to an insane asylum like most others had to do at this time. Thank God for the years of research that brought medications to help these individuals.

[Kathy Krieg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. As a social worker and mother who had foster children, adopted children and birth children (all adults now) I know how mentally ill some children are. Although this story broke my heart with the lack of knowledge and help available for this family (1968 the book was published) we have come a long way with help for families and medication available for children and adult. However, I still feel we need to continue to work to provide and improve services to all families with mentally ill children, many children and families fall through the cracks

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of a mothers struggle with her sons schizophrenia.