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

by Andrew Solomon

The focus is on improving the quality of life even for those whose clinical condition is poor, emphasizing that impaired people still have capacities that should be maximized.

Marnie Callahan’s sister Nora has long been in constant conversation with Eric Clapton.

“Finally my mother had a stroke,” Marnie said. “I can’t say Nora caused the stroke, because my mother had borderline high blood pressure, but it didn’t help.

Nora is now in assisted housing, but keeps her sister abreast of her exchanges with Eric Clapton.

Jeffrey Lieberman, at Columbia University, evinced considerable frustration around how little use is made of the tools we have.

“We now have medical and social means to help people. But because of limitations in resources, lack of awareness, and stigma, most people aren’t helped.”

A family member can commit a schizophrenic to institutional care only if he poses an “acute” danger to himself or someone else, and the burden of proof is difficult even though at least one in five schizophrenics will attempt suicide.

the man was therefore not a danger to himself, the judge refused to commit him.

“It’s harder to get into a state hospital than into Harvard Medical School.”

routinely obliged to lie about their relatives’ symptoms to obtain services.

In the West, conversely, families often disenfranchise schizophrenics. Some people with schizophrenia lack insight into their condition and have to be strong-handled, but others are the primary experts on their own condition, and some have offered their families suggestions on how to interact with them.

While the positive symptoms of schizophrenia are most disturbing and striking to outsiders, the negative symptoms are frequently more burdensome for families coping with a son’s or daughter’s hostility, absence of personal hygiene, and listlessness.

Malcolm Tate, a man with severe paranoid schizophrenia, made murderous threats against his family for sixteen years while they tried persistently to find him treatment.

Finally, in December 1998, his mother and his sister drove him from their home in South Carolina, and his sister shot him to death by the road, then wept. “I was scared that one day Malcolm was going to lose his mind and harm me and my daughter, and I just didn’t know what else to do,”

Rosemary Baglio’s family is riddled with schizophrenia.

On good days, he would put rolls in the player piano and show the kids Irish step-dancing. On bad days, he would argue with his hallucinations.

Johnny became psychotic at age seventeen.

When Johnny started smashing things, Rosemary was the one who took him to Massach...

Joe, was the first boy in her family. “He had beautiful auburn hair and soft brown eyes and dimples, and he was just sweet,” she said. “Everybody loved Joe.” In high school, Joe began to have troubles. His parents thought he was getting into drugs. His grades dropped. He stayed up all night. “Finally when he was seventeen, I told him, ‘Daddy and I are taking you to be examined. We have to find out what is going on.’ He was terrified.” That very day, he had his first real breakdown.

“I came home and it was all smashed, and there was blood all over the kitchen ceiling.”

Then one day Rosemary got a call that he was running in traffic and screaming incoherently. When he emerged from that hospitalization, Rosemary decided to find him a halfway house, but within a year he was psychotic again.

“Can you sacrifice the other eight for the one that’s sick? He was so gentle underneath that if he ever did hurt somebody, how would he live with that afterwards? I had to protect him, too.”

“There were no soles on his sneakers. He was dirty from lying on the ground all night. I said to the judge, ‘Could you serve Thanksgiving to anybody, knowing your son is living like this?’ The judge committed him.”

Joe needed to have daily injections of Prolixin in Malden.

Joey never got his shots. The fourth day he started hallucinating.

Joey attacked his grandfather so savagely that he had to have brain surgery; if he’d died, Joey would have been charged with murder. Joey was committed to one year at Bridgewater State Hospital for the mentally ill.

Rosemary was open to having Joe at home again, but if she took him in, he would lose services given only to those with no place to go.

“but there’s another man in Joe’s ear. That’s the voices whispering to him.”

They found it in his brain, started another kind of chemo.

He just slipped away right with me sitting there.”

“No. Can I make him want to live? No. I have been fighting for Joey for thirty-two years, I’ve been protecting him and fighting for him every inch of the way. And I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t save him.”

Schizophrenic self-advocacy raises awkward ontological questions.

It is preposterous, even sentimental, to deny the biological nature of mental illness—or, indeed, the biological nature of mental health, however such a state is defined.

Although most Mad Pride advocates criticize the manner in which medical professionals promote drugs as a primary treatment for mental illness, many rely on these drugs to function and support the right of others to choose for themselves whether to take medication.

Pharmacological treatments for schizophrenia carry risk of neurological impairment, metabolic dysfunction, long-term toxicity, diabetes, blood disorders, and rapid weight gain.

Walter Forrest’s son Peter lapsed into schizophrenia his junior year in high school,

“He’d always been Mr. Popularity, and then he had some minor

social adjustment problems, and now we were wrestling him to the ground.”

“Peter had an offbeat sense of humor, so I was groping,”

One night, Peter ambushed his father and tried to push him through a window.

Eventually, Peter attacked Walter with a kitchen knife, and Walter had to call the police. Peter was put in a secure ward for six months.

People with schizophrenia are avoided, mocked, and misunderstood.

Although they are erratic in their behavior, most people with schizophrenia are not dangerous to strangers.

A 1998 study found rates of violence in psychiatric patients who are not substance abusers consistent with those in the general population, and such violence is five times more likely to be directed at family members.

Deshawn James Chappell’s murder of Stephanie Moulton, a social worker who was caring for him; and Jared L. Loughner’s spree in Arizona, during which he killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was severely injured.

Deshawn Chappell was growing up, his mother, Yvette, thought he would be a minister.

“He would say the devil was telling him to do things,”

“He would talk about curses and hexes.” By twenty-one, he was constantly showering because his skin was crawling; he couldn’t ...

He nonetheless refused medication because of i...

Deshawn fractured three bones in his stepfather’s left eye socket.