Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

and Harriet would have liked to have another child—“someone who knew how to play,” in Bruce’s words—but they were too tired to contemplate that.

This procedure was originally developed to remove heavy metals from the bodies of wounded soldiers during World War I.

orally—to bind to metals, which are then excreted into the blood, urine, and hair.

Chelation is recommended by advocates of the theory that a mercury-base...

some vaccines cause...

Some parents claim to have observed miraculous improvements as a result of chelation, and those claims, made in sincerity, have led to a burgeoning, often underground, and largely unregulated business in the chemical “detoxification” of autistic children.

When Angela was born, it was immediately clear that there were problems. She was put into a full-body brace to correct a contorted frame, a displaced hip, and what looked like a clubfoot.

She didn’t walk until she was almost two. Words came, but slowly, and she was pitifully thin.

“If you removed the capacity for someone to become autistic, would that also remove the things that make us interesting as human beings? Maybe the same genetic structures also produce creativity and diversity.”

Their premises are so different that any true dialogue is impossible. They’re unable to speak with each other because they have such different epistemological and philosophical foundations.”

Some autistic people resent the perception that the activists who celebrate aspects of autism are speaking on their behalf.

The same is true for parents of sometimes severely autistic children who want to see their offspring as something other than deficient or broken.”

Seashore House, a children’s hospital.

Jae had intuited that Chris would need infinite patience, and a progressive approach to things he found difficult, including intimacy itself.

Jae gathered that he could absorb visual information, and she came up with a system of flash cards and symbols.

It was almost as though the coddling attention of his demanding mother was needed to bring him out into communication, while his father’s harder exigencies were needed to help him see its purpose—as if his mother gave him language and his father made him use it.

A quantitative study has shown that almost half of parents who kill a disabled child do no jail time at all. “While you could kill a person who has a cold, and that would end their suffering due to their cold, a more appropriate method is to provide them medical assistance, rest, plenty of fluids, and compassion,”

This line of reasoning comes perilously close to eugenics.

The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade may be irrevocably

lost, even as that child looks much the same as ever.

The more likely reality is that schizophrenia, like Alzheimer’s, is an illness not of accrual but of replacement and deletion;

this disease to some degree eliminates that person.

The betrayal of schizophrenia is its irrational juxtaposition of things that vanish and things that don’t.

Schizophrenia can take away the ability to connect to or love or trust another person, the full use of rational intelligence, the capacity to function in any professional context, the basic faculty of physical self-care, and large areas of self-awareness and analytic clarity.

these internally generated relationships become far more real and important than any interaction with the authentically outside world.

commonly terrified and almost always paranoid.

For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different.

symptoms of depression, because psychosis itself is distressing

It seemed that illness had cut these schizophrenics off from those lives so entirely that they were hardly conscious of them.

Harry Watson,

Impossibly good-looking at age thirty-eight, he had such a pleasant and open expression and such an easy and amusing way of speaking that I would not have known anything was wrong if I hadn’t been told ahead of time.

Harry said, ‘I don’t think I could handle that kind of pressure.’ Doesn’t that sound strange from a ten-year-old? He has told me that even at that age, he felt like there was something wrong.”

Then my mother and his father, my stepfather, divorced when he was twelve, the same year I left for college. The message he had heard all along from his father was that you don’t show weakness. Instead of admitting that he felt weird, Harry just hid it.”

“He still thinks that if he acts like he’s normal, he’ll be treated more normally by the world. All it means is that he doesn’t get as much help as he needs.”

He told me that everyone thought he was gay. He was convinced that his girlfriend thought he was gay, that all of his friends thought he was gay, that my mother and his father thought he was gay. I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! No one thinks you’re gay.’

He discovered on this LSD trip that his brain always is that way. That’s, basically, a declaration of schizophrenia.”

he went into Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital in San Francisco in the spring of 1996.

“He was pointing to a van in the street, saying that’s where the FBI had their equipment. He thought the nurses were trying to poison him, and he didn’t want to take medication. I went to his apartment after he was hospitalized and it was in complete chaos, like a reflection of the inside of his head.”

“It went well for a while, and then he was saying his apartment was bugged,” Kitty said. “He had stopped taking one of his medications. I said, ‘Why don’t you come over here for the night?’ He said, ‘Your house is bugged, too, I’ll show you where the transmitters are.’

But he’s not a risk-taker, so he’s less suicidal than you would expect.”

He’s well enough to know that he shouldn’t tell other people the voices are real, but not well enough to believe it himself.

But in Harry’s world, nothing is stable for long, and on one of my later visits with Kitty, she revealed that he had stopped going to the greenhouse. “His world has plateaued at the smallness that it’s at,” she said.

It’s a very dangerous, scary, lonely world, but it also has moments of beauty in it.

Schizophrenia is broadly categorized as having positive symptoms—the presence of psychotic hallucinations—and negative and cognitive symptoms—psychic disorganization, absence of motivation, blunted affect, loss of language

(called alogia), withdrawal, compromised memory, and general decrease in functionality.

It is degenerative, unlike autism, which, albeit pervasive and persistent, does not generally become increasingly debilitating over time.

it unfolds through five predictable stages.

premorbid phase,

points to delays in walking and talking, more isolated play, poor school performance, social anxiety, and...

prodromal...